I get quite a bit of mail from people all over the world who want to know why a memorial to a friend is hosted under the domain bovine.com. Usually I type up a quick summary, and send it off. And I never really hear again from that individual once their curiosity has been sated. Those of us who knew Allen personally don't even have to think twice about the bovine.com/Allen relationship. It was just one of those things.

It goes like this. Allen really had this fetish for cows. This all really stemmed from two things. One, he was a user on one of the earliest online virtual worlds, LambdaMOO which was an experiment in virtual communities hosted at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in Palo Alto, CA. The cow reference should be fairly easy to spot there. Allen got me into LambdaMOO in the early days as well, and I've been a member there for many years. Two, almost everyone knew that he loved The Dead Milkmen. And since they really really had quite a bit of cow related stuff on their albums, in their lyrics, and at their shows... it just kinda rubbed off on Allen. Everything had to be cows, cow stuff in the kitchen, leather jackets, leather boots, cow books, cow art, stuffed cows, anything in cow print. It was quite an obsession, albeit a harmless one.

So back when 99% of you who are reading this had no clue whatsoever what The Internet was, Allen decided he wanted to register a domain and set up some servers, for fun. Since he was working for a tiny little garage-based startup called Netcom run buy this guy Bob, that was not a problem at all. So Allen sets himself up a PNC (personal network connection) to his apartment just a few blocks away from Netcom. He decides that two Class C (pre CIDR) That's 512 IP addresses for you slow folk address blocks would be enough space in case he wanted to expand. And then of course, with some mail to the InterNIC yes, back in those days you had to send official mail with the official forms from an official company stating that you would be using the domain for official purposes bovine.com was born.

I helped Allen run the original bovine.com since we were both hip on Commodore Amigas and AMI-Unix at the time. In trade for being his gopher and occasional HTML boy I got to set up an account on the box and help keep it online. He expanded my knowledge of routing, protocols, UNIX skills, and the way the 'net really worked. And in trade I'd bend over backwards to help him if he ever needed a favor. We didn't exactly do much with bovine.com. It was just quite cool to have a domain and a block of routed space back when such a thing was unheard of. Especally since the company Cattletech and Associates had to be formed to lay fingers into the domain to begin with. None of this click-click-click on the 'NIC website because little Bobby wants his own dot-com shit back in those days. Don't even get me started on getting address space out of the greedy little fingers of ARIN. So as you can see, the memorial just wouldn't be right if it wasn't under Allen's old domain bovine.com.

Those who know me are well aware of how hard I had to fight with the InterNIC to get the domain back after Allen died. Allen was the only contact listed for the domain, and the PNC was terminated and the hardware mothballed before I had a chance to send mail to the NIC from the auth'ed e-mail address. Allen and I always talked about getting me on the contact list for bovine, but it was just one of those unimportant things you don't really care about getting done. Because really, what could possibly happen? Heh, well... now I know. After battling with the InterNIC for a year, bovine.com finally came back under my control.

The odd thing was someone had registered it after it expired the first time, provided false contact information, and never did anything with the domain. Calls to the ISP providing nameservice went unanswered and as far as I can tell, the company never really existed. Someone just filled in the blanks on the webform with whatever popped in their head. Even calls to the supposed upstream provider for the IP space the supposed nameservers were in were ignored. And this is me calling from the Network Operations Center of a Tier I ISP at the time. If I could have just contacted that person instead of battling with the 'NIC, I would have gladly paid them for the domain ten-fold the reg cost just to avoid dealing with the bottom-feeders that answer the phones/mail at the InterNIC. These days I and another long standing friend of Allen's are the contacts, and bovine.com will be kept as Allen's memorial as long as her and I are alive. And if something happens to either of us, control will be passed on to other close friends of Allen. And he had more than enough 'net-savvy close friends. Allen will not be forgotten.

I'm really suprised that some heartless stuffed-shirt company has not come forward yet with it's team of lawyers and tried to leverage control of the domain out of my hands. I'm just waiting for one of the big moviehouses to produce some crap film about a talking cow or some shit and come hunt me down. And if you are a company who thinks that you pre-date or somehow have trademarked this domain, think again. Denizens of the ether world were hitting bovine.com with copies of NCSA Mosaic and Big Throbbing N years before the 'net got infiltrated by mouth-breathers. So you can't have it, you won't get it, I won't sell it, don't even ask. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I wrote quite a bit more than I thought I had in me. Thinking about the old days of bovine.com bring a smile to my face, and remind me how much fun my life was when Allen was around to be a part of it. I look back at that time as some of the best years of my life. And the funny part is I wasn't Mr. Pre-IPO startup company richie-rich, I didn't have a great job, no big house up in the Santa Cruz mountains, no stable of exotic motorcycles.

But the one thing I did have was a true friend who was always there for me, and with little effort on his part made my life seem far more exciting and interesting that it actually ever was. I really miss that because I just don't have any friends like that these days. Keeping bovine.com online is the least I can do for Allen.

Web Curator,
Moike