Who, in the 80s Internet, was Kibo?
If you remember the USENET era internet (1988-94), when the internet was a non-graphical, entirely counterintuitive set of Gopher networks, college databases, and newsgroups mostly accessed by browsers like Mosaic, you might remember one of the longest running jokes: Kibo, or Kibology, essentially a jokey parody of religion that was the “first draft” of the Church of the Spaghetti Monster gag. If you mentioned Kibo, God of the Internet, so they say, he would magically appear to you.
Kibology was already an exasperatingly tired meme by 1989, but Kibo got an article in Wired magazine in 1993 (when that magazine was the white-hot epicenter of digital culture) with the title KIBO IS GOD in giant letters. The high point of this had to be 1992, when Kibo ran a joke campaign for president, the same year he was mentioned in Playboy magazine.
The origin of Kibo was a little more ordinary: James “Kibo” Perry was a computer code enthusiast and graphic designer, who, around 1987, wrote a very advanced Perl script crawler that automatically found any occurrence of his name anywhere on USENET. As Kibo had a good deal of spare time, he would usually respond to your post that mentioned him. This was, you must remember, in the years before people could google themselves, or any advanced search functionality of this type. So the fact you could mention Kibo and he would instantly appear to talk to you was downright magic, it made him seem all-knowing and supernatural.
I don’t usually read my comments a lot...but I think I will here, for one reason and one reason only: I want to see if Kibo will show up when his name is mentioned...even to this day.
