scan of an actual printed message, chosen randomly. see more.
In late 1995, Yikes as being served with MacHTTP on a speedy
Macintosh II. I began experimenting with Userland Frontier, as a replacement
for the slow AppleScript CGIs I had previously written. I stumbled
across the ImageWriter II's manual, which documented the commands
for controlling the printer in ASCII mode. When combined with a
serial port XCMD, I had an Internet connected dotmatrix printer.
The machine received a peppy upgrade to a PowerMac 7100av, with WebSTAR and a PowerPC native Frontier. Not much later, MkLinux replaced the MacOS, and a quick and dirty perl script was hacked up as a replacement.
Unfortunately, in December 1997, Yikes became a collocated FreeBSD machine. A temporarily out of service page went up, but I never went through with ever setting the printer up again.
All that remains of this interactive experiment are the 500+ pages of printouts from the era of the ImageWriter II. For many years, these printouts were living with Tony and Davida Jordan, who were kind enough to take care of them, and return them upon request. I have a feeling there may be more pages in existence, but I haven't the foggiest idea where.
I will be posting selected messages, in chronological order, to a blog. I would like to catch up with the date, and start posting "this day in history, 10 years ago".
I used to offer to paste printed messages onto a post card and mail them out, on request. Unfortunately, I never saved a copy of the messages in electronic form. If you happen to have one of these postcards laying around, I would love to hear from you!
The gateway is still listed in Yahoo, as it has been for the past 10 years. Perhaps it may very well live again.
In the mean time, enjoy the blog!
[ blog || Yikes! || eric at yikes.com ]