Why the Antipope name?

Antipope acquired its name due to a drunken mistake in 1991.

Back in the mists of pre-history, I wanted an email and usenet
feed very badly. However, usenet feeds were kind of hard to come by in
the UK in 1991. Indeed, the only way to get one was to cough up a
sum of money comparable to the price of a car, or to bribe a sysadmin
who could give you a downstream feed
via UUCP over modem. (This was before there were any ISPs in the UK,
you see.)

Well, I found a sysadmin who was willing to be bribed with alcohol, and
by and by the subject of a UUCP feed came up.

“What sitename do you want?” he asked.

I’d been posting on usenet under the alias “AutoPope — pontifications
by email”. (If you don’t know what the long word means, go look it up.)
So I said, “How about autopope.uucp?”

“Okay.” Hic. Burp.

And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called
antipope.uucp (which is still in the UUCP maps, although it hasn’t
collected any mail for the past four years). I connected to it
using a 286-powered PC running at all of 12MHz, and a 2400 baud
modem. And there was no spam. (You tell that to youngsters these
days and they won’t believe you. Mutter, grumble.)

The Antipope tag followed me when I got my first Demon dial-up TCP/IP
connection, about six months after Demon started up in 1993. (It took me that
long because ISPs were new and badly funded in those days — I only
found about about them by word of mouth.) So I still have
antipope.demon.co.uk. And of course, it seemed reasonable
in 1996 to register antipope.org and hang it off my own
server in 1997, when I finally got around to a colocation deal.

So Antipope is not a significant name; it’s just a communications
error. You have been warned.

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