What is Apricot Systematic?

Apricot Systematic is said to be a control division of Scanner Services, under Rigellian auspices. That is supposed to mean that there is this nebulous organization, Scanner Services, and that it has many different parts. Apricot Systematic is one of the parts that provides direction for other parts of this nebulous organization.

Where did the phrase "Apricot Systematic" come from anyways?

The name has a relatively simple history. In the early days Scanner Cinema had a strong predilection towards a particular TV anime series known as Urusei Yatsura. One of the early Laser Discs we had of this series was a compilation of various bits of animation from the TV series set to an orchestrated version of the original background music for the series. The title of this particular discussion was Symphony Urusei Yatsura. The band that was listed as performing this music was Apricot Systematic. We had thought that this name seemed particulary neat at the time.

This was also during the time of one of the early and most succesful real-time CMC's at RPI: Connect. A bunch of us used to hang out in a single discussion which Peto had started to name after anime that we had recently watched (most likely at Scanner Cinema.) The first title that we recall was Laputa, Castle in the Sky, discussion L. The names would change depending on the mood of whoever created the discussion. After watching Symphony Urusei Yatsura and becoming attached to the name Apricot Systematic we started using it for the title of the discussion. We still had our share of other anime-related titles, but the apricots were starting to grow, as they say.

We are not sure who did the first variation, but we suspect that it was Zed. Shortly after a pattern was established for the discussion title of "Apricot Systematic" and a somewhat irregular group of people started using this discussion, some of us would invariable have fun using alternate names such as:

There were many others. Zed had a complete list of the titles once upon a time and when we recover that list we will let you get to it from here.

With the death of Connect and several of our fuzzy crowd leaving RPI, or simply not being online on Clover as much a mailing list was suggested as a way for the people to keep in some loose form of contact. The name for this mailing list was Apricot Systematic, and those on the list were sometimes referred to as apricots. This list still exists, although it has moved a couple of times.

As with most such things over time, people leave places, and go on to new places and jobs. In May, 1994, Scanner left RPI for a new job. Leaving behind a high level of network connectivity was decidedly not one of his goals in life, so he got a domain and a class C network to go with it. Choosing a good name is always a difficult process, and many names were proposed and either already in use, or not quite right. Some that almost made it were:

Early on in the process Garance Drosehn had suggested apricot.com in the spirit of the apricot mailing list (and the discussions on Lily, Clover, and Connect. This eventually did win out and was chosen as the domain name. Along with such a domain name one needs a bit of explanation to tie it up. This explanation is now that little blurb you see at the top. That Apricot Systematic is a control division for Scanner Services under Rigellian auspices.
Return to the control division.

Page maintainer:

scanner@apricot.com