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In 1964, an eight-year-old girl named [[Stacy Horn]] Horn was one of the 50 million people who took a trip to Queens to attend the World’s Fair. One of the most popular exhibits was “The Egg,” a futuristic technology-packed dome hosted by IBM that featured cutting-edge devices such as the Selectric (an electric typewriter) and an immersive theater experience complete with hydraulic lifts. This was one of the first moments the general public met computers. And they loved them. "Oh yeah, we’ll definitely use that,” was the general consensus of fair-goers when they saw the Bell Labs Picturephone.
[[34 years later...|1998]]
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In 1998, [[Stacy Horn]] sponsored the [[Silicon Alley Talent Show]] (and performed a drum piece), a fundraiser that was held for a new grant making organization called the Web Development Fund. The [[line-up|Silicon Alley Talent Show]] reads like an all-star roster for [[Silicon Alley]] Alley.
How did we get from electronic typewriters in egg-shaped buildings to living with the [[internet|Internet Memories]] in our pockets?[[The Answer|Internet History]]
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Aka, Miss Outer Boro, Miss Williamsburg.
Before [[Word.com|Word Magazine]], Marisa Bowe had never worked in magazine publishing, but she had been the online manager of [[Echo]], which she got into while working in a temp word-processing job. As Marisa Bowe describes - in a similar way to so many others who reflect on their role in [[Silicon Alley]] - this had unknowingly perfectly prepared her: “I was in the right place at the right time. The screwing around I'd done online was now a skill. As one of the few people around NYC who had a smattering of both art/lit and internet, I was offered a job as a webzine editor. It turned out that I couldn't have possibly planned a better résumé, because everything I knew how to do was part of "multimedia."Here we are at the front door of the former MethodFive office, a digital design firm during the 1990’s. Just down the block is the intersection of Houston and Broadway, the epicenter of Silicon Alley.
At its height, it even had its own newspaper, the Silicon Alley Reporter. Built on the backbone of the NYC art and media scene but always in the shadow of the West Coast, it started as a group of pure tech junkies with artist side gigs who couldn’t believe they got paid for playing with [[HTML]] and pushing what this new online medium could do.
But it quickly morphed into companies with fake employees, auras fueled by wacky names and crazy parties, clocking out at 2am, overnight millionaires, CEO’s that constantly played video games, drinking and drugs in the office, massive turnover and burnout, talk of IPOs and equity. The work turned formulaic. It became the freaks against the suits. And finally, the smoke and mirrors became apparent to the world with the [[Dot Com Crash]] of 2000-2001.
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After moving to New York in the 1960’s, Red Burns worked in technology and in academia, where she had a knack for bringing people from different backgrounds together, sparking collaborating and igniting innovation. As the former President of NYU, John Sexton said, “Red Burns is Chrysler Design Award in 2002, the same year as Steve Jobs. But more impressive than her accomplishments and accolades is the way people remember her. She believed in people, sometimes in a way they had never believed in themselves. She understood how to create collaboration and spark connections between people from different backgrounds.
Red impacted the burgeoning new media scene in New York through her own social-impact-focused work, through her mentorship, through challenging the status quo and asking tough questions, but probably most notably through the ITP program itself. She co-founded the Alternate Media Center at NYU in 1971, which evolved into a two-year masters program called the [[Interactive Telecommunications Program|ITP]] (ITP) which she chaired from 1982 to 2010. Since its founding, ITP has graduated over 3,000 creative technologists. As we’ll see at our later stops, several of these alumni were central figures in the ecosystem in New York City in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
A.K.A.the "Godmother of [[Silicon Alley]]."
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The Well was an west coast BBS system started in California in association with the Whole Earth Review.
Billy Idol chatted on The Well with fans who picked up copies of the special album release he created with [[Jaime Levy]].
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Echo was one of the first social networks online using what was called a Bulletin Board System. This was a pre-browser chat room that users dialed into and navigated using a text window. Visitors could select different conference topics ranging from “Angst” to “Don’t Panic” to “Zines.” Echo was pulling in so much traffic at one point that the City of New York had to rip up Stacy’s street and install more phone lines. Her neighbors were furious, but she promised them they would understand one day.
[[Stacy Horn]] made it a point to create a place where women were welcome. 40% of Echo’s users were women even as the [[internet|Internet Memories]] became increasingly dominated by men. She made sure that every discussion topic had one male and one female moderator. She found that if people met in person, they were more likely to stay on Echo, so she arranged meetups at local bars such as White Horse and Art Bar. She also partnered with local organizations like Paper Magazine, the Village Voice, and The Whitney, trading Echo chat rooms for advertising space in their publications. She wanted Echo to be intensely local.
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We begin our tour at New York University’s (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. Take a look in the display windows at the costumes designed by the theater department. These are the doors that the likes of Lady Gaga, Spike Lee and Alec Baldwin walked through as undergrads. Watch out for the students with backpacks briskly passing you by now as they head to class.
From 1979 to 2019, the fourth floor of this building was home to the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). The story of ITP starts with a video camera, specifically the [[Sony Portapak]] in the hands of a woman named [[Red Burns]].
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[[Chop Suey]] was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as the CD-ROM of the year.
[[Aliza Sherman]] was named by Newsweek as one of the Top 50 People Who Matter Most in the Internet – one of only three women on the list.
[[Aliza Sherman]] held her first [[Webgrrls]] meeting in [[@Cafe]].
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HTML stands for [[Hypertext]] Markup Language.
[[Aliza Sherman]] took a $10 HTML class.
[[Stephanie Syman]] and Steven Johnson taught themselves HTML in order to make Feed Magazine.
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We expect continuity in history, but we’ll see that that’s an illusion. I won’t attempt to make this a clean A to B or even a chronological history of computing and the internet in New York City. That’s not to say there aren’t any through-lines. In particular, the history of art in New York is present throughout all of these stories and created an ecosystem distinct from other computing hubs such as the Bay Area, Seattle and Boston. The [[internet|Internet Memories]] - and [[World Wide Web]] as we know it - is now a place full of culture, design and art; however, in its infancy, it wasn’t clear how to use the internet for those ends. New York is where those attempts started.
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The answer has a lot to do with little girls like who grew up to shape the computing industry in New York City. The dominant narrative of the creation of the internet, however, is one of those “great man” theories of history, headlined by household names such as Alan Turning, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.
But the [[truth |History Truth]] about the development of the internet as we know it today is a more nuanced story and therefore one that is more complicated to tell. This tour aims to put women back in the narrative. It’s important, especially in technology, to look back to understand how we got here, where we might be going, and how we might change our destination. In our current political and technological climate, this act of reflection is particularly urgent right now.
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Stacy started [[Echo]] after falling in love with [[The Well]] when she had to create an account for a homework assignment at [[ITP]]. She had never seen anything like it before. As she puts it, the world was such that if you liked a book you couldn’t just walk out your door and start talking to the first person you saw about it. But suddenly in cyberspace, you could.
When asked if she was a visionary, she insists that, “no, no, it was so fun, anyone could see it was the future.” But she also saw another side of the future. “The first thing you discover in addition to the fun is that people fight, there’s sexual harassment…we had a Nazi.” If people were having a fight online, she would ask that they meet in person and work it out with a moderator. And usually, they wer able to work it out.
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When Netscape launched in 1994 and the New York Times had to explain an internet browser to their readership, they used Word.com their example of what a website is. One of the first internet magazines, [[Word.com|Word Magazine]] was run by Jaime Levy and Editor-in-Chief [[Marisa Bowe]].
Titles such as “goddess of the electronic kingdom,” “creative genius” and “one of the hottest minds in cyberspace” were attached to Jaime Levy’s name. Levy got her start in e-zines when she began making and distributing a magazine called [[Cyber Rag]] on floppy discs as a student at [[ITP]]. If you were lucky, you might be able to find a floppy disc enclosed in an envelope posted to a telephone pole in the [[East Village]].
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It is inside [[@Cafe]] that Aliza Sherman sat one day in March of [[1995]] waiting to meet her first Webgrrl. A year earlier, she had accidentally started a women’s networking group online and was now about to meet the members in person for the first time.
For a time in the 1980’s, women were more likely to be familiar with operating computers than men because of the clerical and data processing roles that were available to them in office settings, and despite the masculinization of the machines themselves. This is how Aliza Sherman became interested in computers – she used her first computer while temping at a bank as a secretary while pursuing a writing career on the side.
After buying her own computer, she became increasingly involved through friends: one showing her how to connect to dial-up, another telling her about [[Echo]] and Women’s Wire which were two local online discussion groups. She joined both, but eventually quit [[Echo]] and was surprised when she got a call from the creator of Echo herself, [[Stacy Horn]] Horn: “We’re trying to get more women online so I wanted to ask why you quit.” At this time, only 18% of Americans had internet at home and women were significantly less likely to be online than men - some estimates say that women made up only 10% of internet users. According to many accounts, it was common for women to be harassed online in the 1990’s. Women like Stacy Horn – and soon Aliza Sherman as well – worked passionately and tirelessly to make the internet a safe and welcoming place.
Through forums such as these, Aliza became known as a leader online. When she saw a billboard advertising a $10 [[HTML]] class, she enrolled and made her first website. Because she didn’t feel safe revealing her identity online, she made an avatar for herself that she called Cybergrrl, complete with a cape and logo. Aliza started scavenging the web for other sites made by women like her and linked to them on her homepage, calling them [[Webgrrls]]. Nestled in the [[East Village]], the vegan restaurant that currently occupies 12 St. Marks Place is the former site of @Cafe, one of the first internet cafes in New York City (and also listed by Wikipedia as one of the first in the world). Take a look inside the windows. Where you see tables with couples and friends eating garlicky kale burritos, monitors used to line the wall.
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During the 1990s you could probably find [[Theresa Duncan]] in the East Village.
If you were lucky, you might also find
You might stop for a coffee and a cyberchat on [[Echo]] at [[@Cafe]].
Look around you, do you see any [[Webgrrls]] walking by?Theresa Duncan was a computer game designer, most well known for an interactive, narrative-based game called [[Chop Suey]].
Tragically, Theresa took her own life in 2007. Even after her death, the press continued to focus on her looks and clothes before her work, referring to her with terms such as the “pretty-girl” of video games and “diva-ish.” As Amy Rose Spiegel, a former employee of the 21st century girls mag Rookie, writes: “[Theresa] knew that even while trying to espouse freedom from gendered ideals within girl-media, people outside of it are quick to appoint you an “It” girl — the awful designation that makes twins out of “female” and “object.”
Theresa wanted to create “the most beautiful thing a 7-year-old has ever seen” but also believed that media and games should be rigorous, educational, and experiential: “I wanted [Chop Suey] to be a rich literary experience, so I tried to use words and ideas that children might not otherwise experience. People aren’t as critical of New Media as they are of cinema or traditional storytelling, but I think more should be expected of it.”
You can wander the streets of Chop Suey yourself in the archived version hosted by Rhizome.
In Chop Suey, two young girls explore the winding streets of their fluorescent city, their adventures narrated by the then-unknown David Sedaris. Players can click on different locations on a winding map and are taken inside locales including Chinese restaurant, a backyard picnic and a circus tent, to see animations of stories narrated with text and sound. Chop Suey was one of the games that came out of the Purple Wave movement in video game design. This movement sparked and then quickly died during the 1990’s, it’s goal to make fun, high-quality computer games for girls that went beyond simply putting a pink bow on packman and rejected practicing traditional gender roles in play. Chop Suey was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as the [[1995]] CD-ROM of the year.
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[[Aliza Sherman's|Aliza Sherman]] site started gaining momentum, so in March of [[1995]] she took another step by posting a message on her page: if you’re a Webgrrl in NYC, let’s meet up. That’s how she found herself in [[@Cafe]] waiting for the first Webgrrl to show up, wondering what a Webgrrl would look like.
Aliza turned Webgrrls into a global network of women on the internet with a mission to support each other in learning about the internet, building skills, and starting businesses. By 2000, the group had 30,000 members.
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Creative Director, [[Jaime Levy]] Levy pushed what content could be on the internet, designing charcter chat bots, curating editorials, producing animated gifs. At that time when there were only 14 million people who had an internet connection in the world, the e-magazine Word.com had 100,000 readers a week.
When [[Jaime Levy]] Levy was brought on to Word.com, she convinced her friend [[Marisa Bowe]] to interview for the managing editor position.
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In a 1993 interview, [[Jaime Levy]] explains her electronic magazines on a TV segment this way: “Basically you just buy this floppy disc - 6 bucks - put it in your computer...boom. If you hate it, take the files off, throw it away, you put your own files on it. It’s recyclable.” They included interactive graphics, sound and animations. This was a new kind of reading: “Interactive means you have some sort of control over your destination, how you wanna read your information, it’s not linear,” as Jaime explains. She eventually turned her floppy disk magazines into a business called Electronic Hollywood.
After finding her floppy disk magazines in a Los Angeles bookstore, Billy Idol contacted Jaime and asked her to make an electronic press kit for his next album. A special edition of the CD for Cyberpunk was distributed accompanied by one of Jaime’s floppies, with three sections listeners could explore: concepts, song lyrics and digiart. The magazine also included Billy Idol’s [[Well|The Well]] address so that fans could contact him over BBS.
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[[Red Burns]] was in her mid 40s when the Sony Portapak came out in 1970. With this handheld, 18 pound camera, Red envisioned a world in which anyone could make tell their own stories at a time when there were only three television networks, in which elders isolated in senior centers could connect through two-way interactive television stations, and in which technology was used to increase the independence of individuals with developmental disabilities.
You have visited this page <<print visited("Sony Portapak")>> time(s).Down the street from Word.com you could find Stephanie Syman who ran [[Feed Magazine|Feed]] with Steven Johnson. Started in 1996, Feed Magazine was another e-Magazine, a competitor of [[Word Magazine]] in a sense.
Stephanie, a freelance technology writer who had studied Philosophy at Yale, was introduced to Steven through a mutual friend: “Hey, you both have email, you should be email buddies,” was the reasoning for the introduction. “That is how few people were online in any way,” recalls Stephanie. Steven was also a technology writer, working for the Guardian. Six months later, after asking their aspiring writer friends for articles and hacking together [[HTML]] code to create a decent layout, they launched Feed.
The volatility and quick growth of the 1990's time before the dot-com crash is reminiscent of the unicorn syndrome in Silicon Valley we see today: Metrobeat merged with CitySearch a year after its founding and two years after that was sold to Ticketmaster in 1998; [[Feed]] merged with Suck.com in 2000, only five years after it started; [[Word Magazine]] was sold three years after starting to Zapata Corporation and closed two years after that in 2000.
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At its beginning, all of Feed Magazine fit on two floppy discs. Constantly experimenting, they added commenting abilities early on and ran features such as dialogues with “thinkers” that took place over longer periods of time. They believed that the internet wasn’t just a place for lists, but also for thoughtful writing. They also wanted to balance out the West Coast tech idealism - epitomized in their minds by Wired, which had launched in 1993 - with a New York sensibility and critical enthusiasm. Feed was started by [[Stephanie Syman]] and Steven Johnson.
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Having not known any other internet interface other than the World Wide Web, it’s hard to imagine a different system for navigating online. But it wasn’t destined to be this way, at all. Between 1984 and [[1991]] many competing [[hypertext|Hypertext]] systems came out. Everyone was trying to figure out: what is the best way to navigate this new format?
When the World Wide Web was first previewed, it was described as a, “‘hyptertext-like interface’ intended for the High Energy Physics community” by one reporter. Its linear structure was much simpler than most others at the conference. “That was all considered counter to what we were doing at the time…It was like, well: we know better than to do that” recounts [[Cathy Marshall]], the creator of a hypertext system called Notecards and winner of the Hypertext Conference best paper award in 1998 and 1999.
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The [[Hypertext]] Conference in 1991 in San Antonio Texas was the moment that changed everything, although no one knew it at the time. This was the moment the [[World Wide Web]] débuted.
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One notable early system was called [[Microcosm]], developed by Dame [[Wendy Hall]] at the University of Southampton, England.
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Notecards was another system developed at [[Xerox PARC]].
Of course, now we all have the [[World Wide Web]].
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In 1993, Cathy Marshall, computer scientist working on a hypertext system at [[Xerox PARC]] saw talk by artist-in-residence [[Judy Malloy]]. Inspired by Judy’s talk, Cathy reached and the two met up at Judy’s apartment, [[brainstorming ideas|Forward Everywhere]] in her backyard that could bring together their writing and programming skills.
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With this [[hypertext system|Hypertext]] developed by [[Wendy Hall]], opening one topic would pull up related topics. With Microcosm, it was possible to visually hold multiple connection on your screen at once. Systems like Microcosm branched, were made up of webs and networks and captured more complex relationships between topics through metadata, rather than a simple single-directional link.
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Wendy Hall was a mathematician who had studied [[hypertext|Hypertext]] at the University of Michigan. One afternoon she was approached by the University of Southampton archivist: “couldn’t we do something wonderful?” The resulted [[Microcosm]] in 1989, a system of spatial arrangement of documents, informed by her work in archiving and library systems.
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In 1993, Judy was hired as the first female artist-in-residence at [[Xerox PARC]]. One afternoon after she gave a talk, she was approached by [[Cathy Marshall]] Marshall who was a computer scientist working on a hypertext system at Xerox PARC called [[NoteCards]].
Inspired by Judy’s talk, Cathy reached and the two met up at Judy’s apartment, brainstorming ideas in her backyard that could bring together their writing and programming skills. They decided to “look for links in our artist-researcher existences” using hypertext systems, which became the basis for a project called [[Forward Everywhere]].
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[[Cathy|Cathy Marshall]] and [[Judy|Judy Malloy]] decided to “look for links in our artist-researcher existences” using [[hypertext|Hypertext]] systems, which became the basis for a project called Forward Everywhere. For two years they sent text snippets, which they called “screens,” back and forth, building a database of their correspondence. They aimed to create a piece showing the interconnectedness of their lives and unique voices, partially influenced by the work of writer Jorge Borges.
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NoteCards was a [[hypertext|Hypertext]] system developed at [[Xerox PARC]] designed to be an “idea processor.” With NoteCards, users could put their ideas onto different modular “cards” and link them together to create different maps of processes and concepts.
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Where [[Cathy Marshall]] and [[Judy Malloy]] met.
Also where [[NoteCards]] was developed.
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Do you remember the first time you used the internet?
“Well, it was on the floor [of ITP] actually. I remember my friend Mike ran over and said, ‘Kate you got to see this!’ It was Mosiac. Everyone who was at [[ITP]] ran down the hall to look. It was so exciting for everyone to use a visual interface instead of a command line.”
--Kate Swann, recounting the first time she saw an internet browser
[[Stacy Horn]] found the internet exciting because it was independent of time and space – nothing had been like that before and it was exhilarating. Stacy helped to host the a New Year’s Eve Party at Grand Central Station called the First Night in Cyberspace in either 1994 or 1995 (she doesn’t remember which). The [[Echo]] team lined the balcony with dozens of computers – all hooked up to phone lines supplied by a provider for free – where party-goers could chat with another person on the other side of the world through a service called Internet Relay Chat. Grainy videos from that night show a middle-aged man in a tuxedo and top hat using his index fingers to pick out “H-a-p-p-y N-e-w Y-e-a-r”. Below, couples waltzed, and an orchestra played on the main terminal floor. For many people there, this magical setting was their first time on the internet.
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[[Marisa Bowe]] at the the judge’s table, [[Jaime Levy]] performing a [[rap]], [[Aliza Sherman]] playing music. And all presided over by the Godmother of [[Silicon Alley]] herself, [[Red Burns]] (whom one performer also attempted and failed to levitate).
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I’m the biggest bitch in [[Silicon Alley]]
I moved here back in 88 straight from Cali
I went to NYU’s [[ITP]]
Finished in 2 years with a master’s degree
My first job was to make a HyperCard stack
With a scripting language that was totally wack
Back in the day when new media was new
I could bullshit my employer’s cuz no one had a clue
I was making ezines on my Mac 2
I was totally wired not like the rest of you
I’m the biggest bitch in Silicon Alley
I’m better than those nerds in Silicon Valley
Bill Gates calls me up when he needs advice
Cuz I’m Jaime Levy and I’m cold as ice
--Excerpt from rap by [[Jaime Levy]] at the [[Silicon Alley Talent Show]]
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