I Knew Kibo Before He Was Kibo.

I first encountered him back in the dark ages of the late 80's, when I was an underclassman at RPI. Someone (I can't remember who; possibly Mitch Gold) gave me a copy of a self-published humor magazine called The Fred. "Magazine" was actually a generous description of this publication, which was made up of four or five 8.5"x11" sheets of ordinary white paper, stapled together at the corner. But it was the only game in town as a local source of satire, and it contained some great cartoons making fun of DAKA (Note 1) and chemistry lab. It was put together by a mysterious figure - soon to become much less mysterious - who called himself "Editor Davros".

Editor Davros was, of course, none other than Jim Parry. I first encountered his real name as a bit of graffiti on the wall of the terminal lab in BARH (Note 2). It said:

"Jim Parry uses $messagesystem (Note 3) when real people have real work to do!"

Of course, knowing Jim Parry as I do now, I have to wonder whether he wrote this himself. It did do its part to enhance his reputation.

Before the advent of campus-wide Unix computing, a lot of local communication took place on MTS, the mainframe operating system to which all of the RPI community had some access. MTS had a bulletin-board-like service called *FORUM, on which people posted everything from discussions of campus issues to political debate to creative writing. And it was on *FORUM that Jim Parry became the entity presently known as Kibo.

I forget what handle Jim Parry was using at the time, but he was working on a story that he called Aurigan Dawn. The only thing I remember about the story (and the only part really relevant to the story of Kibo) is that the names of the characters consisted of a title and the name of a physical object. The more status the person had in the society, the more valuable the object would be. So a manual laborer might be Mr. Mud, while an aristocrat would be named Lady Diamond. One of the characters in the story was named... King Body.

You can probably figure out the rest. Jim Parry started using "King Body" as his screen name on *FORUM, and eventually contracted it to "KiBo" and finally to the now-famous "Kibo". At one point he declared himself Pope and was signing himself as either Pope Kibo or Pope George Ringo I, but it was the "Kibo" part that stood the test of time.

As a co-conspirator of Kibo's from the early days, I participated in some of the first Kibology projects, and I've saved a number of artifacts from the early 90's, which I consider to be the Golden Age of Kibology. Unfortunately many of these items are drawings which I can't reproduce without a scanner and vast amounts of disk space. But Kibohistorians may find the following writings to be of interest.

Note 1: DAKA was the much-maligned (and with good reason) campus dining service in the 80's. If you were a freshman, you were forced to pay for at least ten of its meals per week. Some suggestions as to what the acronym stood for included "Death And Killing Association", "Dioxin Analysis in Kitchen Areas", "Dead Animal Karkasses", and "Dinners Attacking and Killing All".

Note 2: BARH stood for Burdett Avenue Residence Hall. This student residence facility was noted for being largely self-contained (it had its own computer lab, dining hall, and laundry facilities) and very remote from the center of campus. During particularly nasty winter weather, some students wouldn't leave the building for weeks at a time. When this building was first proposed, it was called Burdett Avenue Residence Facility.

Note 3: $messagesystem was the e-mail program on MTS.

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