The antipope got its name from a drunken mistake in 1991.
In the mists of prehistoric times, I longed for an email and Usenet feed. However, in 1991 it was difficult to obtain Usenet feeds in the UK. In fact, the only way to get it was to spend a sum of money equivalent to the price of a car, or to bribe a system administrator who could give you a downstream feed via UUCP on the modem. (You see, this was before any ISPs existed in the UK.)
Well, I found a system admin who was willing to take bribes through alcohol and slowly the topic of UUCP feed came up.
“What sitename do you want?” he asked.
I was posting on Usenet under the alias “Autopop – Pontification by Email”. (If you don’t know what the word long means, look it up.) So I said, “How about autopope.uucp?”
“Ok.” Hitch. Burp.
And the next day, I was the somewhat surprised owner of a site called
antipope.uucp (Which is still in the UUCP maps, although it has not collected any mail for the last four years). I connected to it using a 286-powered PC running at 12 MHz and a 2400 baud modem. And there was no spam. (You tell this to today’s youth and they won’t believe you. Rave, rave.)The antipop tag followed me when I got my first Daemon dial-up TCP/IP connection, about six months after Daemon was launched in 1993. (It took me so long because in those days ISPs were new and badly funded – I found out about them only through word of mouth.) So I still have
antipope.demon.co.uk. And of course, it seemed appropriate to register in 1996 antipope.org And got it off my server in 1997, when I finally got a colocation deal.Antipope is therefore not an important name; It’s just a communication error. you have been warned.
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