[editor]

Today I was reminiscing about the good old days of computing. Back when 300 baud was blazing fast, capacities were expressed as 16K not 16KiB, and people craved computers with the CP/M operating system because its vast library of available software couldn't be matched.

So as I'm wondering the back roads of the interweb looking up old information to feed my nostalgia, I came across a mention in Wikipedia of T.H.E. Fox. For those of you who don't know, THE Fox was the first computer cartoon. This was back before the commercial internet. Strangely, even though the cartoon was mentioned in a much larger article about CompuServe, it didn't have its own page. So, like a good wikipedian I decided to start one to fill in the knowledge gap about this portion of computer history.

Except I can't. When I tried Wikipedia informed me that there used to be a page about T.H.E. Fox, but it was deleted. Looking further I found out that it was erased by some Wikipedia administrator in Finland who apparently erases lots of pages of things he doesn't think should be there, but many many other people do, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. He claims there is no proof that T.H.E. Fox ever existed. I know it existed because I've seen it. And I have an issue of Run magazine in the closet that has a picture of it, too.

It's commonly assumed that the Wikipedia service is a repository of human knowledge. That is false. Wikipedia is a repository of common human knowledge. Which means the Britney Spears article is updated six times a day, but the world's first computer cartoon isn't welcome.

So then I remembered that I just happen to run a web site that is really quite popular with Google. Pretty much anything written on HAIF ends up in Google data centers around the world in a matter of hours. Sure, I don't have the breadth of Wikipedia. But I sure as hell can have the depth.

So here's everything I know about T.H.E. Fox:

T.H.E. Fox
T.H.E. Fox was the world's first computer cartoon. Penned by Pam Springs, California telephone repairman Joe Ekaitis from 1986 to the mid-1990's, the cartoon starred a red-and-white fox by the name of Thaddius Horatio Eberhard Fox. THE Fox was originally drawn on a Commodore 64 with the Koala Painter program and matching Koala Pad input device. Ekaitis later migrated to using the Advanced OCP Art Studio by Cambridge Softworks when it became available.

While Mr. Ekaitis certainly wasn't the first person to use the Koala Pad to draw a cartoon, the reason THE Fox is special was its regularity and distribution.
New episodes appeared regularly and a continuing, reliable story line was developed at a time when reliable computer communication was a pipe dream. He achieved this by distributing THE Fox through all of the major computer networks of the day: CompuServe, GEnie, QLink, and ARBNet. The use of these four networks gave the cartoon strip national exposure at a time when text terminals were the primary way of going online.

It is important to note that THE Fox was distributed through ARBNet. This was a small network of BBSes operating in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The software used was the ARB BBS by Arthur Richard Brock of South Amboy, New Jersey. It was a remarkably advanced piece of networking software for its time. It competed against the less-stable, but free, C-Net BBS software on the Commodore 64. The less stable C-Net software eventually won because of its unchecked pirated proliferation.

ARBNet computers used a form of store-and-forward networking to distribute messages to the whole. Each night (when phone rates were lowest) each computer in the chain would dial the next one to send and receive messages for other computers in the network. In this fashion, an e-mail message could make it from Philadelphia to upstate New York in just two days, which was remarkable at the time. The internet, such as it was, would take up to seven days to deliver the same message, depending on the length of the "bang path" involved. (A bang path is how e-mail addresses were written in the old days. Instead of editor@example.com, they were written as "...killer!jolnet!nodak!osuny!editor". A similar method was later adopted by FidoNet computers when the IBM PC came of age.

A key link in this ARBNet chain was the Nowhere BBS in Highland Lakes, New Jersey. Because of its remote geography, no telephone company was interested in the town in which it was located. Neither GTE, nor New Jersey Bell, nor New York Telephone/NYNEX wanted anything to do with the area. Local telephone service was eventually established by the Warwick Valley Telephone Company. Warwick is in New York state, but its service area included the leftover parts of New Jersey that no one else wanted. So the Nowhere BBS was in a position to store-and-forward messages across an area code boundary for free because it was based in the 201 (New Jersey) area code, but could make free phone calls to parts of the 914 (New York) area code.

The Nowhere BBS also received direct downloads of T.H.E. Fox for distribution through ARBNet thanks to an agreement between the sysop and Ekaitis.

THE Fox was featured in several magazines and newspapers, including Run, TC-128, and the San Bernardino Sun. Its popularity inspired other cartoon such as Rapid T. Rabbit. Rapid T. Rabbit's author's name escapes me, but he was unique in that he would memorize the Greyhound and regional bus schedules for the entire United States. You could give him a pair of cities and he would be able to tell you from memory which buses you should take to travel between them.

As technology advanced Ekaitis changed his method for creating T.H.E. Fox. He bought an IBM clone and started doing the cartoon in real pen-and-ink and then scanning the drawings into his computer for further distribution. The last I heard anything about T.H.E. Fox was April, 2004 when he got a deal with a small comic book publisher to put some of his strips in a compilation book.

[Jeebus]

Fight The Power!

[VicMan]

It wasn't deleted by one person.

Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...tion/T.H.E._Fox

Other people "voted" on the issue, and the consensus was to delete.
* EDIT: Actually, there was no consensus, BUT the closing admin decided to delete anyway - This can be used to your advantage, editor, in a deletion review.

Look at the criteria stated in the AFD. If you can satisfy the criteria and appeal it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review - You may be able to get it back

Many of the votes were "keep," but brenneman looked at it and deleted it...

"The result was delete. Without sourcing, the basic foundation for article writing does not exist. - brenneman 01:23, 29 January 2007 (UTC)"

So, if you can find sources that satisfy his demands, you can appeal the deletion.

This post has been edited by VicMan: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 at 11:24 AM

[editor]

VicMan, on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 @ 11:18am, said:

It wasn't deleted by one person.

Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...tion/T.H.E._Fox

Other people "voted" on the issue, and the consensus was to delete.
* EDIT: Actually, there was no consensus, BUT the closing admin decided to delete anyway - This can be used to your advantage, editor, in a deletion review.

Look at the criteria stated in the AFD. If you can satisfy the criteria and appeal it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review - You may be able to get it back

Many of the votes were "keep," but brenneman looked at it and deleted it...

"The result was delete. Without sourcing, the basic foundation for article writing does not exist. - brenneman 01:23, 29 January 2007 (UTC)"

So, if you can find sources that satisfy his demands, you can appeal the deletion.

I'll repeat what I wrote in my PM to you for the benefit of the group:


Wikipedia needs to come up with a less cumbersome process. In the time it would take me to read all of those instructions and implement them I could have written the THE Fox article on HAIF three times. I don't blame the people who run Wikipedia for that, the wiki engine really isn't designed for that sort of CRM processing -- it's for writing and linking. Maybe if wikipedia comes up with a better process for handling disputes I'll fight for it.


Because of its unique content, putting the article on HAIF is probably just as effective as putting it on Wikipedia. Google will simply link to HAIF instead of Wikipedia. And that's the purpose -- to make the information available.

In my original investigation of the T.H.E. Fox deletion I came across the supposed "criteria" for keeping the article alive. It was things like citations from newspapers, books, and magazines with links. It's simply not possible to link to a newspaper that was published in a small town 20 years ago. That doesn't mean that the events didn't happen, it just means that "new media" like Wikipedia are following the same "old media" guidelines that they claim to be superior to.

[VicMan]

By the way, there is a website called Everything2 that tries to document ALL human knowledge. If you want, you may put the article there.

Everything2 is here: http://en.wikipedia....iki/Everything2