[cb321]

I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 30 years ago. EDIT: @karel-3d elsethread seems to think this one is (1998).

[fredoralive]

It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?

[cb321]

That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union".

The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?

EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.

[js2]

FWIW, Claude followed a similar trail and honed in on Spring 1992:

Three internal anchors line up tightly on 1992:

- EFF's age. Barlow writes that EFF, "after almost two years of operation," now thinks of itself as building "the united Mind of Humanity." EFF was founded July 10, 1990, so "almost two years" puts the writing at roughly spring/early summer 1992.

- "Last summer's coup in the Soviet Union." The August 1991 Moscow coup. Read naturally, "last summer" was written sometime between fall 1991 and the end of summer 1992.

- Internet size. Barlow says the Internet "connects some 800,000 (mostly UNIX) computers." Per RFC 1296, the host count was 727,000 in January 1992 and reached ~992,000 by July 1992. 800,000 sits squarely in spring 1992.

He also doesn't mention Mosaic, which launched in January 1993 — by 1993 it was almost a reflex in Barlow's writing — which is weak supporting evidence that this predates that release.

https://pastebin.com/LFdWS2SQ

[karel-3d]

I just put the title to Google and pattern-matched 1998. I am sorry, as I was probably wrong, it seems it's earlier.

edit: earliest web archive crawl is from 1996

https://web.archive.org/web/19961220120042/https://www.eff.o...

so you are probably right with 1994

[harimau777]

That shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it wouldn't surprise me if people still used the old name even if it isn't technically correct.

[nemo1618]

Evidence for 1992:

> After a disorienting visit from the FBI in May of 1990, I wrote a rant called Crime and Puzzlement, which led to my establishing with Mitch Kapor (who had previously founded Lotus Development Company) an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

> Now, after almost two years of operation...

[layer8]

Several bibliographic references put the article to 1993 or 1992. The Soviet coup quote would confirm 1992. There was more than one HyperNetwork Conference in Oita, the first one was in 1990. Maybe it was annual or biannual.

[cb321]

I am unfamiliar with the history of the piece. Many things are possible. He may have "mostly wrote" it in 1992 and then "polished it" for a 1994 Oita conference, but was somewhat sloppy in internally updating everything date-dependent like the coup part. People also can be very flowery/metaphorical about using the word "coup". Not sure if they even have attendee/speaker lists online for those Oita conferences anymore, but that might also help if he wasn't at all of them. Bitrot / entropy can corrupt the digital world as well as the physical, just with more checksums if the referents still exist. ;-)

[layer8]

I found a source that confirms the 1992 or 1993 date: https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook7.html

“Two years later [after the first conference in 1990], I was invited back, along with John Barlow […].” “[…] which explains why I was invited to Oita in 1990, and why Barlow, Johansen, and Johnson-Lenz were invited to join me there in 1993.”

While 1992 vs. 1993 is still ambiguous (either 1993 is a typo, or the invitation was two-and-something years later), the text confirms that there was a second HyperNetwork conference in Oita in either 1992 or 1993, and that Barlow was invited to it.

EDIT: Another source: https://www.eff.org/pages/complete-acm-columns-collection

“Will Japan Jack In? For the October, 1992 Electronic Frontier column in Communications of the ACM by John Perry Barlow […] At a conference on globally networked computing in Oita Prefecture in February, I was astonished to hear a number of Japanese corporate officials […] proclaim enthusiastically the potential of the "Hypernetwork"[…].”

This would imply that there was a Hypernetwork-related conference in Oita in February 1992 that Barlow attended.

[cb321]

Ah. Good searching! So, maybe the 800,000 computers was "in DNS but un-pingable IP hosts" (dial-up was a big then then) or maybe included non-IP "networked" hosts or who knows.. Anyway, I agree that your finds make it more likely to be 1992/3 than 1994. Thanks!