IO Acquired

When I first found my way onto what VP Gore called "the information superhighway", I stumbled quite innocently upon io.com.  I found them via telnet.  Don't go looking for io.com.  It's gone.  The service started as an Austin, TX based BBS in the 1980s.  It was the official home of Steve Jackson Games, the creators of the GRUPS role playing games.  The BBS's claim to fame came when the BBS was raided by the US Gov't as Steve Jackson Games were readying a new role playing game based on computer hacking.  It seems gov't agents mistook the rule book devised for the game as a manual on how to conduct real, destructive computer hacking!  In 1990, the offices of the BBS were raided, computers seized, and no explanation offered for several days.  The whole affair is detailed here.  The Illuminati Online BBS grew into io.com as a result of the settlement in that case.  Steve later brought in his brother Ken Jackson to run the Internet business so he could concentrate on his first passion - RPGs.

In 1993 I was deep into MOOing and in need of a Unix shell account to access a server side client used to MOO called TinyFugue.  I found that io.com issued Unix shell accounts for $10/month, reachable by telnet.  (Most users of io.com were based in Austin, TX, the home of the former company, and most used the dial-up services that also provided Unix shells as part of their pricing.)  So, I got an telnet-only account.  With the account came 5 and later 10M of webspace to do with as you pleased.  That's how I began HTML coding.  I had http://www.io.com/~jkweston listed very early at Yahoo.

I owe much of my early on-line experience to io.com.  And, so I am sad to see it go.  PrismNet now owns io.com and they seem to honor most of the original services offered for the last 14+ years by io.com.  I - for the time being - can still use the io.com domain for email.  I felt a part of Internet history by having an early io.com account.  No more new accounts are being offered to the io.com domain.

I knew something was up when the frequency of the witty, tongue-in-cheek network news articles announcing important information or weirdness became, well, infrequent over the last 2 years.  I shall miss the fnords and stuff.  Perhaps this article, from 1996, hints at what happened to io.com, though there has been no official word as to why the company was sold.  And, perhaps, that prism in PrismNet looks a bit too much like the old io.com logo.   All I can say is YOU ARE NOT CLEARED FOR THAT INFORMATION.