Regula Bochsler - Leaving Reality Behind - Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet

Herbert and Hans were so excited about their discovery that they demanded Internet access at their art school, and even set about organising access for the rest of their class (though their efforts were met with derision from the archly hip art students, who thought that the latest cool media was video, not the Internet). In Zürich, the rest of the crew wangled passwords for the computer lab at the university.

One of the first things the friends used the Web for was to search for a new name, because Thomas hated Combination-Combination. He thought it was both too long and too dull ever to be seen as anything cool. Instead, the story goes that Juri created a little computer program called the Term Shooter, a script that was able to generate names. It created four-letter words with a vowel in the middle, like that of their role model Sony, and descenders or ascenders for graphic effect. Supposedly, one night towards the end of 1994, they were huddled around their respective computers in Vienna and Zürich with the Term Shooter spewing out thousands of scrolling names. It was like a transnational shoot-’em-up word game; if a name didn’t stick immediately, it wasn’t worth considering. At first they found nothing. Then one name resonated across the collective. Herbert, Juri and the others danced on their keyboards. It was better than Sony. It looked good and it had comic connotations. They liked it for its whimsy, for its drug reference and its playfulness. The name was etoy.

Later in 1994, Peter was using Mosaic to navigate his way around the Web one day when he chanced upon a Web site, based at a polar-research centre in Ohio, that also hosted Web sites for free. There he created the beginnings of etoy’s first site; it was dreary, with black text on a grey background. It had a Web address and a URL with so many parts that it was impossible to remember: http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/hppetoy.html. Next to the icon of a little bomb, Peter had written, ‘etoy, here we are now! … etoy is THE new lifestyle for the coming generation. Please visit us when this site will be finished, in mid-January.’

The boys celebrated in the way they knew best: by getting drunk at a party. Elated by their new discovery, they ran round scribbling the ‘@’ symbol on to party-goers’ hands. As Peter remembers, ‘We were so excited that we told everybody how brilliant the future would be.’

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