bianca.com

» see bianca.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

bianca sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it was already four years old when i first got a modem working, and it belonged to a version of the web that had effectively ended by then, the one where a site could be famous for being one of only a few hundred sites. by 1998 the number was in the millions and the whole logic of the place had changed.

it was built by jill atkinson, chris miller and david thau, who were working at hotwired during the day and putting this together at night. the site itself gave its founding as valentine's day 1994, which is a lovely date and sits slightly earlier than hotwired's own launch that october, so the exact ordering depends on which version you take. what is not in dispute is that they wrote the software themselves, because in 1994 there was nothing to install.

the fictional owner was a woman named bianca. everything on the site was framed as her property and her hospitality. that framing did a lot of work, because it turned a pile of cgi scripts into somewhere you could be a guest.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the house ~

navigation was a crude hand-drawn map of a floor plan, and clicking a room got you that room's conversation. the kitchen ran recipes, mostly for seduction, while the bedroom ran what you would expect from the bedroom. other doors led to film or philosophy or whatever else somebody had decided to hang a sign on.

the point of the metaphor is that it solved a problem nobody had a vocabulary for yet. in 1994 nobody had settled on the idea of a subforum or a channel yet. the house told you, without a single line of instruction, that different parts of the same site had different rules and different registers. you already knew how a house worked. thirty years of interface design has not really improved on it.

~ the shack and the lawyers ~

the site's popular name was bianca's smut shack, and it earned the first word honestly. the reputation was pornographic and the content often was, but what people who were there describe is stranger than that. the same unmoderated boards that carried explicit fantasy also carried long arguments about literature and film, from the same users, on the same afternoon. the smut was the door policy rather than the whole building.

in 1997 radio shack came after the word shack. the claim was eventually withdrawn, but it is a small perfect artifact of the period, a consumer electronics chain sending lawyers at a website over a noun. the volunteer moderators, who were called trolls back when that word still meant something protective, kept the place running through it.

~ what got buried with it ~

nerve.com bought bianca in may 1999. that was less an acquisition than a rescue, because the site had never worked out how to pay for itself and nerve was the closest thing to a natural home. then the dot-com collapse arrived, and by 2001 nerve had given up. the stated reason was bandwidth costs, which for a text site with no video is a way of saying that a lot of people were still using it and none of that use was worth anything.

the domain outlived the community by years. hackers eventually wiped what content was left around 2007, and what remained was a blank page with the words bianca loves you on it. as endings go it is more graceful than most. the interesting part is what did not survive: the idea that a website could be a place with a floor plan rather than a feed, and that walking somewhere could be a legitimate way to choose what you read.

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