TABNet (The Adopted Bastards network)

TABnet was (the community using) an FTN-style echomail network in area code 604 from 1993-99. Its underground mandate was one of free speech, explicitly pushing back against the uptight FidoNet system and the general Public Domain side of cyberspace from its traditional hub at Beatle's BBS [InterZone] (Beatle being one of the three titular adopted bastards, the others being bLUCK and Incognito.) In online "free speech" spaces of the era you never knew for sure whether you were getting anarchists or libertarians, but on the whole, possibly due to the age skew, TABnet had more of the former than the latter going on.

Tabbers averaged late-teenager in age, though there was a broad spectrum. They also defined themselves as distinct from chatboarders, peers who hung out in online chatrooms cruising for modem-facilitated booty calls, but something the two groups shared was a penchant for meets or real-life get-togethers. The first TabMeet, immortalised in the TABnotes, was a visit to an Artropolis art exhibition. A memorable art piece involved a treasure hunt for a singularly artistic cabbage hidden somewhere in the vicinity of Gastown's Blood Alley, but they never found it. (In its honour, the message base for proposal and review of meets has been dubbed alt.cabbage.die.die.die ever since.) The all-night Kitsilano haunt of [Benny's Bagels] kicked off many an impromptu TABmeet when tabbers encountered each other there unexpectedly and decided to go off and have a little adventure in the middle of the night.

TABnet and Mist Classic had a lot of people in common, though the Venn diagram of overlap was by no means complete -- plenty of tabbers had no interest in underground computer art and conversely many computer artists were uninterested in the "free speech" of a bunch of Vancouver teenagers. Its community (and specifically the crew focused around djjj's BBS Al's House of Meats) supplied early Mistigris with a lot of its lit writers.

Other notable TABnodes included Hype's Sweet Oblivion, Magik Elvis' Neo-Graceland, The Lung's APOADS (A Product Of A Deranged Society), Wild Thang's Subliminal Reality II, Etana's Dreams of Dark, Enchanted Lizards, Voi's Transient Lunacy, and of course TST and TJM. Like any clique that lasts long enough, TABnet produced an incredible quantity of jargon and lore, much of it codified and documented in TABnotes, circulated on the TABdisk. (See a pattern?)

Around the turn of the century The Extremist tapped the TABnet community to establish a group house in the Strathcona neighbourhood, "the TABhouse" (or "Sietch TABr"), where many people in the TABnet and Mist Classic spheres temporarily claimed residence.

The TABnet community left echomail behind with BBSes in the 20th century, but have had a web forum of some kind running more or less ever since, yielding basically 33 years of community uptime. Currently they grouchily haunt a Slack with a Discord bridge.