What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
I am neither related to nor a sock puppet of
Hal Mumkin, though I don't think we've ever been seen in the same thread. Coincidence? In addition to being an
insipid children's book about a fence-building pony, an
Indian soap opera, a
pumpkin-based flower-arranging project, a
web comic featuring aquatic robots, and a
poisoned seal, mumkin is a word in Arabic (and Pashto, Turkmen, Urdu, Hindi, Uyghur, Farsi and others) that translates as "possible," "perhaps," "maybe," and the like. The u is long, by the way, so it sounds like something a cow might say. That's the deal.
BBSes ->
Tymnet ->
BITNET -> Internet. It took a while to get there, but I reckon my first
Internet connection would've been in 1992. I remember thinking that the domain name system was very sexy compared to BITNET. I also remember thinking that LambdaMOO and Gopher were going to be the new killer apps, but then Mosaic with inline jpegs came along, and the visceral immediacy of stuff like
this made me realize how much things were about to change.
Most of the mumkins on the English-speaking Internet seem to be me (even
this one), except for the ones that aren't.
