6 ms·

Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987

100 points by harryvederci 2y ago

johndoe0815 2y ago
Looks like it were the real addresses, see https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1265/property-of-the-week-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams/ https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...
- harryvederci 2y ago
  Haha awesome, thanks for looking it up!
  - ccppurcell 2y ago
    Phone number looks right too. Correct format for London at the time and apparently 01-359 was the Canonbury telephone exchange, which is almost certainly the closest to Duncan Terrace!
- pydry 2y ago
  Looks like a different address close by - on a street parallel to upper street.
  - agsnu 2y ago
    Listed as the “new address” in the screenshot…
jhbadger 2y ago
>I read somewhere that Douglas Adams (writer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) was the first person in Europe to own an Apple II computer. Not the 1977 Apple II, but the 1984 Macintosh. Adams owned a variety of computers from the obscure DEC Rainbow, to the also-obscure Apricot, to the BBC Micro, but as far as I know he never owned an Apple II, but he was a fan of the Macintosh from the first time he saw it and even wrote in the "about the author" section of his books that he "lived with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh".
- sedatk 2y ago
  IIRC, he wrote some of his books on a PowerBook.
  - glhaynes 2y ago
    And it's been 30 years since I read them, but I think I recall lots of mentions of Macintosh (IIs in particular, I think?) in the Dirk Gently series.
- zabzonk 2y ago
  For those of you that might be interested, the Rainbow was an attempt by DEC to make an IBM-compatible AND a CP/M compatible in one box - it was a very nice box, and made a great VT200 terminal, but the compatibility was just not there. The Apricot was another attempt at an IBM PC compatible, this time from a UK company. It was awful. You could not fit an Ethernet card into it without using an expansion box, much like the RAM pack on a Sinclair ZX81, and with similar reliability.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rjsw 2y ago
    The Apricot PC [1] was not an IBM PC compatible, it was a Victor 9000/Sirius 1 compatible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC
    - jhbadger 2y ago
      Yes, it was one of those MS-DOS machines that wasn't a full IBM compatible -- another one briefly popular in the US and Japan was the Sanyo MBC-550 (or "Silver Box"). The idea was that people would write software that just used the MS-DOS API (the way they did for CP/M machines). But unfortunately they didn't -- most software assumed that it was running on an IBM PC so machines that didn't convincingly appear to be IBM PCs failed.
    - 2y ago
fsckboy 2y ago
pre internet, your name, address, and phone number would published in the widely distributed telephone book. if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unlisted" number (I think you had to pay for it), but that was relatively rare. you might recall, the opening of the original Terminator film (1984, same time period) hinges on this idea: the robot has a name and a city, he tears that page out of a phone book in a phone booth, and starts visiting the addresses one by one. it's how we all lived (minus the killer robot), and it didn't seem strange at all. Women who lived alone frequently would have just their first initial instead of name, but that was not for fear of "stalkers", it was for fear of potential "heavy breathing" annoyance calls late at night.
- jockm 2y ago
  Anyone could pay to have an unlisted number, it wasn’t crazy expensive in the US at least
  - donatj 2y ago
    My mom worked in corrections and after an incident with one of her coworkers getting attacked at home, we got an unlisted number. I remember as a teen being very irritated that people could no longer find me in the phone book.
    - cgriswald 2y ago
      You weren't alone. After my parents divorced I lived with mom and she went back to her maiden name.
  - anjel 2y ago
    IIR it was $1.50 month for NY Tel in the mid 80s, about the same cost as a hamburger for this times.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  haha was not aware "heavy breathing" calls were a thing
Joeboy 2y ago
I used to live nearby. Was always amused by the Hotblack Desiato estate agent signs.
- chilmers 2y ago
  I still live nearby and am similarly amused. 22 Duncan Terrace is an especially nice house, in an area not short of nice houses. Clearly Adams had done pretty well from Hitchhikers and his other work by the 80s. Iain M Banks also lived in Islington in the 80s and much of his novel Walking on Glass is set in and around the place, and include some references to Adams living there.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  > But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, there is a character in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy named Hotblack Desiato. Yes, they are named after us. No, we didn’t just pull this name out of thin air, it’s actually the last names of our two founders. -- https://hotblackdesiato.co.uk/about-us/ https://hotblackdesiato.co.uk/about-us/
segfaultbuserr 2y ago
In 1987, doxxing yourself was the norm. ~80% of the Usenet messages from the 1980s (to early the 1990s) had names, institutions, office addresses, and phone numbers attached to them too. Most were universities, governments, or corporate R&D addresses, but there were many small businesses and home users as well. Some phone numbers are probably still valid today. In fact, an Usenet archive (UTZoo) has already been taken down from the Internet Archive due to an alleged legal threat made by an individual (despite that this archive was indispensable if anyone wants to find any historical information from this era, and that it had been available online for the last ~20 years before it was taken down, with multiple copies still online). I suspect the legal status of these kinds of early online community archives will be increasingly problematic over time.
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  BBSes usually required your name, home address, and phone number as part of signing up for an account. I never gave it much thought when entering my information nor later when collecting it from others when I was a SysOp. Once in a while when driving around I might see a street sign and think "Oh, that's where Frisbee_Guy lives" if I recognized it but never considered using it for anything nefarious. Also remember computer magazines of the time often had sections where people would get their problems published along with an address for anyone wanting to contact them about it. Sometimes even a phone number.
- mmcgaha 2y ago
  Magazines used to have pen pal sections where kids would post their name, age, and address so anyone could write them. It was a different time.
dcminter 2y ago
"...the chances of being picked up by another craft within those seconds are two to the power of two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand, seven-hundred-and-nine to one against. Which, by a staggering coincidence, was also the telephone number of an Islington flat, where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl, whom he entirely failed to get off with." -- The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams This one was, on a similar note and by a not so staggering coincidence, the phone number of friends of Adams who didn't mind getting oddball phonecalls (if I remember the lore from Don't Panic accurately).
ekianjo 2y ago
It's not called doxxing if it was a mistake. Doing is doing it to put people in danger.
- SapporoChris 2y ago
  doxing, the act of exposing private or identifying information on the Internet about an individual or group without the person’s or group’s consent, usually with malicious intent.
lucasllinasm 2y ago
I read "Bill Watterson" instead of "Bill Atkinson", and for a brief moment, the story in my head was pretty wild.
- asveikau 2y ago
  I misread two names. Bill Waterson doxxing Scott Adams. Because they're both comic strip authors, I suppose. But reading TFA and seeing hypercard set me straight.
throwawee 2y ago
It was a different time. Let's not forget Douglas Adams himself doxxed a man in the earliest versions of The Hitchhikers's Guide for being the worst poet in the universe.
nsainaney 2y ago
Everyone knows his number anyways.... 424242424242....
7thpower 2y ago
For some reason I read this as Fredrick Douglas and thought maybe it was the undocumented parts of Fredrick’s life. Disappointing, but otherwise a great read.
eastdakota 2y ago
For what it’s worth, seems like it was indeed his address: https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1265/property-of-the-week-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams/ https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...
- Quarrel 2y ago
  It's also the address Companies House gives for him when he was a Director of his business: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02649032/officers https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... ("doxxing" directors, particularly in the UK, is pretty straight forward.)
jasomill 2y ago
As a personal aside, I once had a scrap of paper with Douglas Adams' email address written in his own hand, which he gave me in the course of a brief conversation after a book signing. Sadly, it was lost in a fire a few years later.
chaos0815 2y ago
apparently his "new home" is on sale https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/22-duncan-terrace-london-n1-8bs https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/22-duncan-ter...

100 points by harryvederci 2y ago

Looks like it were the real addresses, see https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1265/property-of-the-week-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams/ https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...

harryvederci 2y ago
Haha awesome, thanks for looking it up!
- ccppurcell 2y ago
  Phone number looks right too. Correct format for London at the time and apparently 01-359 was the Canonbury telephone exchange, which is almost certainly the closest to Duncan Terrace!
pydry 2y ago
Looks like a different address close by - on a street parallel to upper street.
- agsnu 2y ago
  Listed as the “new address” in the screenshot…

jhbadger 2y ago

>I read somewhere that Douglas Adams (writer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) was the first person in Europe to own an Apple II computer. Not the 1977 Apple II, but the 1984 Macintosh. Adams owned a variety of computers from the obscure DEC Rainbow, to the also-obscure Apricot, to the BBC Micro, but as far as I know he never owned an Apple II, but he was a fan of the Macintosh from the first time he saw it and even wrote in the "about the author" section of his books that he "lived with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh".

sedatk 2y ago
IIRC, he wrote some of his books on a PowerBook.
- glhaynes 2y ago
  And it's been 30 years since I read them, but I think I recall lots of mentions of Macintosh (IIs in particular, I think?) in the Dirk Gently series.
zabzonk 2y ago
For those of you that might be interested, the Rainbow was an attempt by DEC to make an IBM-compatible AND a CP/M compatible in one box - it was a very nice box, and made a great VT200 terminal, but the compatibility was just not there. The Apricot was another attempt at an IBM PC compatible, this time from a UK company. It was awful. You could not fit an Ethernet card into it without using an expansion box, much like the RAM pack on a Sinclair ZX81, and with similar reliability.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rjsw 2y ago
  The Apricot PC [1] was not an IBM PC compatible, it was a Victor 9000/Sirius 1 compatible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    Yes, it was one of those MS-DOS machines that wasn't a full IBM compatible -- another one briefly popular in the US and Japan was the Sanyo MBC-550 (or "Silver Box"). The idea was that people would write software that just used the MS-DOS API (the way they did for CP/M machines). But unfortunately they didn't -- most software assumed that it was running on an IBM PC so machines that didn't convincingly appear to be IBM PCs failed.
  - 2y ago

fsckboy 2y ago

pre internet, your name, address, and phone number would published in the widely distributed telephone book. if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unlisted" number (I think you had to pay for it), but that was relatively rare. you might recall, the opening of the original Terminator film (1984, same time period) hinges on this idea: the robot has a name and a city, he tears that page out of a phone book in a phone booth, and starts visiting the addresses one by one. it's how we all lived (minus the killer robot), and it didn't seem strange at all. Women who lived alone frequently would have just their first initial instead of name, but that was not for fear of "stalkers", it was for fear of potential "heavy breathing" annoyance calls late at night.

jockm 2y ago
Anyone could pay to have an unlisted number, it wasn’t crazy expensive in the US at least
- donatj 2y ago
  My mom worked in corrections and after an incident with one of her coworkers getting attacked at home, we got an unlisted number. I remember as a teen being very irritated that people could no longer find me in the phone book.
  - cgriswald 2y ago
    You weren't alone. After my parents divorced I lived with mom and she went back to her maiden name.
- anjel 2y ago
  IIR it was $1.50 month for NY Tel in the mid 80s, about the same cost as a hamburger for this times.
ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
haha was not aware "heavy breathing" calls were a thing

Joeboy 2y ago

I used to live nearby. Was always amused by the Hotblack Desiato estate agent signs.

chilmers 2y ago
I still live nearby and am similarly amused. 22 Duncan Terrace is an especially nice house, in an area not short of nice houses. Clearly Adams had done pretty well from Hitchhikers and his other work by the 80s. Iain M Banks also lived in Islington in the 80s and much of his novel Walking on Glass is set in and around the place, and include some references to Adams living there.
duskwuff 2y ago
> But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, there is a character in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy named Hotblack Desiato. Yes, they are named after us. No, we didn’t just pull this name out of thin air, it’s actually the last names of our two founders. -- https://hotblackdesiato.co.uk/about-us/ https://hotblackdesiato.co.uk/about-us/

segfaultbuserr 2y ago

In 1987, doxxing yourself was the norm. ~80% of the Usenet messages from the 1980s (to early the 1990s) had names, institutions, office addresses, and phone numbers attached to them too. Most were universities, governments, or corporate R&D addresses, but there were many small businesses and home users as well. Some phone numbers are probably still valid today. In fact, an Usenet archive (UTZoo) has already been taken down from the Internet Archive due to an alleged legal threat made by an individual (despite that this archive was indispensable if anyone wants to find any historical information from this era, and that it had been available online for the last ~20 years before it was taken down, with multiple copies still online). I suspect the legal status of these kinds of early online community archives will be increasingly problematic over time.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago
BBSes usually required your name, home address, and phone number as part of signing up for an account. I never gave it much thought when entering my information nor later when collecting it from others when I was a SysOp. Once in a while when driving around I might see a street sign and think "Oh, that's where Frisbee_Guy lives" if I recognized it but never considered using it for anything nefarious. Also remember computer magazines of the time often had sections where people would get their problems published along with an address for anyone wanting to contact them about it. Sometimes even a phone number.
mmcgaha 2y ago
Magazines used to have pen pal sections where kids would post their name, age, and address so anyone could write them. It was a different time.

dcminter 2y ago

"...the chances of being picked up by another craft within those seconds are two to the power of two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand, seven-hundred-and-nine to one against. Which, by a staggering coincidence, was also the telephone number of an Islington flat, where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl, whom he entirely failed to get off with." -- The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams This one was, on a similar note and by a not so staggering coincidence, the phone number of friends of Adams who didn't mind getting oddball phonecalls (if I remember the lore from Don't Panic accurately).

ekianjo 2y ago

It's not called doxxing if it was a mistake. Doing is doing it to put people in danger.

SapporoChris 2y ago
doxing, the act of exposing private or identifying information on the Internet about an individual or group without the person’s or group’s consent, usually with malicious intent.

lucasllinasm 2y ago

I read "Bill Watterson" instead of "Bill Atkinson", and for a brief moment, the story in my head was pretty wild.

asveikau 2y ago
I misread two names. Bill Waterson doxxing Scott Adams. Because they're both comic strip authors, I suppose. But reading TFA and seeing hypercard set me straight.

throwawee 2y ago

It was a different time. Let's not forget Douglas Adams himself doxxed a man in the earliest versions of The Hitchhikers's Guide for being the worst poet in the universe.

nsainaney 2y ago

Everyone knows his number anyways.... 424242424242....

7thpower 2y ago

For some reason I read this as Fredrick Douglas and thought maybe it was the undocumented parts of Fredrick’s life. Disappointing, but otherwise a great read.

eastdakota 2y ago

For what it’s worth, seems like it was indeed his address: https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1265/property-of-the-week-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams/ https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...

Quarrel 2y ago
It's also the address Companies House gives for him when he was a Director of his business: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02649032/officers https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... ("doxxing" directors, particularly in the UK, is pretty straight forward.)

jasomill 2y ago

As a personal aside, I once had a scrap of paper with Douglas Adams' email address written in his own hand, which he gave me in the course of a brief conversation after a book signing. Sadly, it was lost in a fire a few years later.

chaos0815 2y ago

apparently his "new home" is on sale https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/22-duncan-terrace-london-n1-8bs https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/22-duncan-ter...