MDN

MDN is the name this edition’s editor gives the company behind The Meta Network. His ruling, given while this context layer was being built, is plain: “MDN was the company behind TMN.” He speaks from inside the story: in 1994 he worked in the same Arlington building as the network’s operators—his own office address stands in the work itself, in lexia 49—and the name he gives is the name as he knew it in those rooms. This entry prints MDN on that basis, and prints the documentary record beside it, because the two do not quite match, and this wiki does not smooth over a mismatch.

His employer in the building—he confirmed the identification on October 26, 2026; until then this edition printed the initials unexpanded—was Picture Network International (PNI), of Suite 107, the address lexia 49 prints. It was his first job after college: he graduated from George Washington University in May 1993, and his published professional profile dates the PNI work June 1993 to October 1994, in technical customer support for the company’s Seymour platform. PNI was the online stock-photography pioneer. Seymour, launched in 1993, introduced keyword search, thumbnail results, online lightboxes, shopping carts and fully automated licensing, and its Publishers Depot mall represented sixty leading stock agencies; his profile puts Seymour’s holdings in his time there at more than 250,000 images from over thirty stock houses. The natural-language search engine behind Seymour had been developed for PNI by SRA Corporation, which transferred the patents to Eastman Kodak when Kodak acquired PNI on July 23, 1997. By the editor’s account, that is the whole of the connection: PNI had nothing to do with TMN, The WELL, the ARTIST conference, or MDN—only adjacent office space in the same building—and what he knew of that world he knew socially, from the smokers at the front-entrance patio; but for the smoking habit, he allows, he might never have known it at all.

What the surviving paper names, almost every time, is Metasystems Design Group—MDG. MDG’s press release of March 28, 1983 announced TMN’s opening under its own name; the era’s directories list Metasystems Design Group, Inc. at 2000 North 15th Street, Suite 103, Arlington, Virginia, telephone 703-243-6622, “telnet tmn.com”; InfoWorld in 1991 called the firm known “for its Caucus conferencing software”; and Screen Porch’s backgrounder, a decade later, says of MDG that it “also hosts The Meta Network”. An earlier listing gives the company at 1401 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 601, Arlington—the Wilson Boulevard chapter of its addresses, at 1401, not 2000. No consulted source expands, or uses, the initials MDN.

One period account names the company in the other styling—and the short form of that styling was the working name of the editor’s whole world. Virginia “Ginny” Little—the Kalamazoo teacher who taught through TMN’s conferencing—published her own account of her Creative Writers on the Net program in 1997, and in it the company appears as Metasystems Design Network: “We ‘connected’ through a computer server company, Metasystems Design Network (Metanet) at the cost of $100 per year per student. The company provided technical support, on-site training during orientation, and conferencing software to ‘house’ our private campus.” The editor’s November 1999 scrape of TMN’s classroom conferences runs on the same name: “Metanet” stands there over a hundred times, in many voices—Metanet’s offices, Metanet’s fees, “the metanet folks”—and when the company changed hands it is the name Little reaches for: “I am negotiating with metanet now. It has become Caucus systems and they are only doing corporate events now” (September 22, 1999). So the documentary record itself carries both full names—Design Group in the directories, the trade press, and the company’s own announcement; Design Network in the account, and the daily usage, of the people the company housed—and Metanet, its short form, is the bridge between the formal record and this entry’s editor, who, shown Little’s text and the scrape’s usage, affirms the identification outright: “Yes. Metanet. The Meta Network is tmn.com.” His MDN matches the initials of the Network styling exactly, though no consulted source prints the initials “MDN” themselves.

What stays open is narrower than it was: which styling the company itself used, and when—and whether MDN was ever the company’s own short form, rather than the form one building’s memory kept. On that the surviving paper is still silent, and this entry does not invent the connection. The question stands open, printed as such, for the editor’s final settlement; the documented company has its own entry under its documented name.

What the editor recalls of the rooms themselves, in 1994, is texture the paper record does not carry. The company occupied the ground floor of 2000 North 15th Street—the listings’ Suite 103 is a ground-floor suite—and at the back of the offices, where a storage closet would ordinarily be, sat the server room: the machines of the ISP side and the Caucus servers, administered by Frank Burns’s son Scott, who lived on site. The offices still carried the remnants and the living memory of the era before them—the mainframes and the bought machine time of Burns’s generation—which the editor is careful to date well before his own time in the building.

Sources and further reading