MindVox
 |
|
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
|
Type of site
|
Social network service |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Founded | December 1991 |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) |
Bruce Fancher Patrick K. Kroupa |
| Industry | Internet |
| Profit | N/A |
| Website | www |
| Registration | Required |
| Launched | December 1991 |
| Current status | Invitation Only (relaunch) |
MindVox was a famed early Internet service provider in New York City. A controversial sometime media darling — the service was referred to as "the Hells Angels of Cyberspace" — it was founded in 1991 by Bruce Fancher (Dead Lord) and Patrick Kroupa (Lord Digital), two former members of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group. The system was at least partially online by March 1992, and open to the public in November of that year.
MindVox was the second ISP in New York City. Some controversy over this statement exists; however, by the time the first MindVox test message was posted to Usenet in 1992, customers of the rival service, Panix, had made nearly 6,000 posts. The test message was apparently posted by the infamous Phiber Optik, who would have been waiting for a Manhattan grand jury indictment at the time for hacking activities.
Another potential "start date" for the service would be the registration of the service's phantom.com domain, on 14 February 1992.
The distinctive logo shown to the left was the system's original ASCII art banner, appearing on the text-only service's dial-up login page. MindVox was originally accessible only through telnet, ftp and direct dial-up. Its existence predates the invention of SSH and widespread use of the World Wide Web by several years. In later years, MindVox was also accessible via the web.
The parent company, Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. took its name from a hacking program written by Kroupa during his early teens, called Phantom Access.
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