Jimmy Pearson was the originator and most outstanding of the Bytebrothers. The Bytebrothers conference is echoed nationally by Lucifernet bulletin board systems. It's regular participants have been posting to each other for years.
Jimmy's humor and sharp wit drew a large audience of remarkable characters from all across the country and all walks of life. Jimmy has left this plane of existence, but wherever he is, he is making people smile.
Bytebrothers was Jimmy's stage, but there were many players.
The following is the closest Jimmy ever came to explaining it.
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BBS: The Kandy Shack
Date: 07-01-91 (10:38) Number: 83302
From: JIMMY PEARSON Refer#: NONE
To: JOE BOB BRIGGS Recvd: NO
Subj: BJORN IS BACK Conf: (91) ByteBros
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JB>-> I always drink before I post electronically. Last time I
JB>-> didn't I wound up with my own network..
JB> JB>Funny, that's how I ended up on TMC, too!
ain't life grand..!!!
This network started because in my second career writing software for pc's it was suggested over and over again that I needed a product support conference for my software. I continued to decline to the managers of the ILINK network, and told them frankly product support conferences bore the fucking shit out of me. Then one day I posted sober and said YES and they set up a feed for me in the midwest and into Canada. On the first day of the conference I posted a set of outrageous rules, started using profanity, and turned it into this.. There was some shock and consternation about "What the Hell is Jimmy doing", and some gnashing of teeth. A bunch of people actually did bitch that they wanted and expected a standard product support conference, and we've been keeping track of the number of technical questions answered in here. It's still under a hundred out of 88 thousand messages but they are there, and they have been answered. So it still IS a product support conference, you can just say there are a shitload of off-topic posts..!
In my first career at writing pc software in the early eighties I had a ball. The computer industry for pc's was brand new and there were no rules. I had three publishers and graphic adventure games all over the country, I had full page and double full page ads in the computer magazines, and got to go to computer shows for free.. All this while I was still working at Boeing, in fact doing instrumentation flight test, and flying around in B-52's..
In 1982 I published a game called Lucifer's Realm which a few months later was banned in the United States because it was too outrageous with Satanic overtones. Interestingly enough the same year it made a book released by Compute Magazine titled the "99 Best Computer Games of All Time". It became an overnight computer cult classic.
After it was banned in America we went ahead and published it in Europe for two more years, and also interestingly enough we are currently discussing the fact that some of these Neo-Nazi anti-semitic games that are coming out right now in Germany stole and are using my graphics. I flipped past Entertainment Tonight about a month ago and saw one of my graphic screens, depicting Hitler, on a pc in Germany, and they were talking about how atrocious and disgusting this jew gassing game was. I was very proud. Anyway Lucifer's Realm is where I got the name for this network..
The network really started independently when over a year ago someone dumped a bunch of hot political messages from an ILINK management conference in here and the people in ILINK got very pissed. My position was I will not moderate what anyone says in here, there are no lines and since this whole thing was set up under them they shut me down. One morning the feeds into New York were cut. Old timers refer to it as the night they pulled the plug.
What followed was a barrage of posts in the ILINK users conference where users are supposed to take complaints. Because many of the people on Lnet also post on ILINK. Traffic went up about three hundred percent, in other words they shut down the sewer and the shit backed up into their living rooms.. They came back to me and asked me to bring it back up under ILINK and I refused. I told them the premise of the net was there are no lines, no restrictions on what you can say, and I'll be god damned if I'm going to run it like a Third World television satellite feed where shit keeps going off and on at the whim of some tight assed politico. So I started a seperate network not dependant on ILINK and that's where this all came from.. That was actually the birth of LUCIFERnet.
Date: 12-24-93 (15:56)
From: JIMMY PEARSON Refer#: NONE
To: ALL Recvd: YES
Subj: Too much shit.! Conf: (2) ByteBros
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We've run 581 messages through here in about thirty hours.
This network and conference is designed as an experiment in erasing all the lines that appear in the other networks as to what you can and can't say.
It's purpose is to allow flights of fantasy and violent profane and pornographic humour to be developed by the users. It's purpose is to find out what happens in a group electronic environment when rules of conduct are eliminated. It seeks to attract epressive users with vivid imaginations who are tired of what they think is mundane in networking. Which to a real extent is BANAL BULLSHITTING....
It's secondary purpose is to provide an electronic meeting place for some of the sickest motherfuckers who have ever used a keyboard.
If you are posting over thirty messages in here per day, all of which are primo and none of which are shit, please do the following.
Send a SASE to HBO Productions 231 Avenue of the Americas New York N.Y. Put all your days messages in there and DEMAND your own HBO comedy special. Then delete the messages from your packet to be uploaded here. You are simply too fucking good for us and the American public deserves you more than we do..
1. When you finish posting in Bytebro if you are using a mail reader go back and look at your REPLIES. If you are entering more then 15 messages in here CHECK and KILL some of them. Leave the best. Try to cut the one-liners and the chitchat to friends. I'm not saying you can only post 15 messages. I'm saying at that point start killing SOME of them. Because SOME of them are bound to be shit!
2. If you are posting a bunch of messages to people in your own town KILL some of them. You can post to them locally and then we don't have to port the fucking messages all the way to British Columbia and Scotland, when you are talking to some geek who lives five fucking blocks from you..!
The above is the only way that we can keep the traffic down to a level where it can be fucking assimilated. We have a number of folks who would like to participate here but simply can't because of the volume. I'd like to keep that problem to a minimum if we could.
The Management
That was Jimmy........