MindVox - Founding and Early Years

Founding and Early Years

The distinctive logo shown to the right was the system's original ASCII art banner, appearing on the text-only service's dial-up login page. MindVox was originally accessible only through telnet, ftp and direct dial-up. Its existence predates the invention of SSH and widespread use of the World Wide Web by several years. In later years, MindVox was also accessible via the web.

The parent company, Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. took its name from a hacking program written by Kroupa during his early teens, called Phantom Access.

MindVox functioned both as a private BBS service, containing its own dedicated discussion groups, termed "conferences" — though usually referred to as "forums" by users — as well as a provider of internet and Usenet access. By 1994 the subscriber base was at around 3,000. In many ways MindVox was a harder, edgier, New York incarnation of the WELL, (a famous Northern Californian online community.) While users were drawn from all over the world, the majority lived in the New York City area, and members who met through the conferences often became acquainted in person, either on their own, or through what were termed "VoxMeats" (a formal gathering of members whose double entendre name was rumored to be well-earned.)

Prominent MindVox "evangelists" included sci-fi author Charles Platt, who wrote about MindVox for Wired Magazine and featured it within his book Anarchy Online. MindVox also attracted (sometimes with the aid of free accounts) artists, writers, activists and luminaries such as Billy Idol, Wil Wheaton, Robert Altman, Douglas Rushkoff, John Perry Barlow, and Kurt Cobain. The level of hysteria and hype surrounding MindVox was so great that in 1993 executives at MTV who were using the system wanted to buy it outright and turn MindVox into a subsidiary of Viacom.