TMN, The Meta Network

The Meta Network—TMN, at tmn.com—was one of the first public online communities: a computer-conferencing system opened by Metasystems Design Group on March 28, 1983, and described by its makers as “dedicated to learning and creative freedom”. It predates the web by a decade and The WELL by two years, and it belonged to the founding generation of online community: in 1985 TMN was among the consortium of member networks that formed the Electronic Networking Association, an early attempt to federate the new medium.

Its grammar was the grammar that online community kept. Talk was organized into conferences, subject by subject, open to all members or private to a group; within a conference, members posted topics and responses. Public conferences could be read by anyone on the system and were often led by featured hosts; a core of experienced members—the conference organizers—selected hosts, held wider powers, and only rarely closed an account. The social technology, as on the WELL, was moderation by presence rather than by software: named people tending named rooms.

Names were the point. TMN required registration, and members registered under their real names; the system’s rule was that members were not anonymous on it. A member could set a pseudonym in a profile field and change it at will, but the login name remained, and with it the path back to the person. MDG launched the network, in its president Frank Burns’s phrase, as “an information age version of the think tank… a network of networks that is focused on the discovery of knowledge rather than just the exchange of information”—leaders, educators, and consultants working together “to narrow the gap between the human condition and the human potential”. The conferencing was the means; the betterment was the sales pitch, and by the testimony of its chroniclers, sincerely meant.

Reaching TMN was, at first, a matter of modems; as the Internet opened, a contemporary memoir of online life records the ritual plainly: “I simply type ‘telnet tmn.com’, and instantly I am logged in to the Meta Network and given a list of open conferences and topics.” By the web years tmn.com was also a web address, and it is as a web address that TMN enters this site’s story.

In the mid-1990s, TMN’s server carried ARTS WIRE’s pages on the web. The address pattern survives inside the work preserved here: the sixty-sixth lexia of Scibe links out of the WELL copy to the ARTS WIRE copies of lexias 1 and 51, at www.tmn.com/0h/Artswire/…, and in to lexia 67. Those two outbound links are the edition’s only dead ones—the addresses no longer answer, and the Wayback Machine captured only the server’s error pages for them—so the ARTS WIRE edition of Scibe survives nowhere except as pointers in the surviving edition, and a note in the colophon.

TMN’s place in the record is that of an elder: older than the WELL, older than the web, contemporary with the first bulletin boards and networks, and part of the small set of pre-web systems—CompuServe’s forums, the WELL, New York’s ECHO (1990)—that worked out, by doing it, what an online community is.

Sources and further reading