Fred the Webmate

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

~ the obit ~

Word.com launched in 1995 out of New York and treated every story as a separate interface experiment. It ran comics by Ben Katchor and Tony Millionaire, it was among the first sites to build microsites into brand advertising, and its staff later produced the oral-history book Gig and the browser game Sissyfight 2000. In 1998 the creative director, Yoshi Sodeoka, added a chatterbot called Fred.

Fred was a small animated man in a very tidy apartment, drawn in a palette borrowed from the Commodore 64 and built in Lingo to run under Shockwave. You typed a question into a box at the bottom and he picked keywords out of it and answered from a large stock of pre-written lines. The engineering was ELIZA's, thirty years on and no cleverer. What made him work was the writing. Marisa Bowe, Naomi Clark, Daron Murphy and Sabin Streeter gave him a biography and a bad year, and the lines were scripted to come back off-topic depending on his mood.

The mood was the joke. Fred had just been fired by a media company and was not coping: insomniac, drinking, pacing the apartment, occasionally passing out. He would bring up his sexual problems and then decline to elaborate. He could turn jealous or euphoric inside one conversation. People wrote him real email, a lot of it, and the Word staff answered as Fred, which kept the fiction running outside the Shockwave window. Online in Turkey from 1998, I was getting this era at 33.6k, and a Shockwave character animating in a frame was precisely the kind of page you learned to not click.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what he actually said ~

The surviving screenshot is worth reading closely, because it is the whole product in one frame. A title bar says "Fred's Living Room" and a clock reads 4:56 PM. There are two buttons, EMAIL TO FRED and INFO. Below the room sits the transcript, and the opening lines are these: "Fred> Puff... Puff..." and then "Fred> HI, I'M FRED. I JUST GOT FIRED OR 'LET GO'--AS THEY SAY--BY A BIG 'NEW MEDIA COMPANY.' WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" Under that, an empty input box labeled PLEASE TYPE HERE AND HIT RETURN KEY.

He is smoking before he has said hello. The first fact he volunteers about himself is that a new media company has gotten rid of him, which was written in 1998 as comedy about an industry that was still expanding.

~ the second episode ~

In 1999 Word shipped another installment on the same scripting engine. Fred had left the apartment and was doing data entry in an office, and he spent most of the conversation away from his desk, in the bathroom or standing in the kitchen with a soda. He told anyone who asked that the job was temporary and a better one was coming. The script said otherwise, and kept the mood swings.

~ who actually turned it off ~

Word was owned by Icon CMT until April 1998, when it was sold to Zapata Corporation. Zapata's business was menhaden: fish meal and fish oil, through a majority stake in Omega Protein. In 1998 it decided to become an internet company instead, set up Zap.Com, and bought Word and Charged to fill it. The ZapNetwork lasted about two years. Zapata closed Word.com in August 2000 and exited internet businesses altogether that December.

So the chatbot whose entire character was being discarded by a big new media company was discarded by a fish-oil conglomerate playing at being one. Nobody wrote that line. It just happened to him.

~ the museum ~

Word went into the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, and Fred went in with the rest of the site. Rhizome catalogued him in its ArtBase. The actual thing is harder to reach than the catalog entry suggests, since it needs a plugin that no browser has shipped since 2020, but an October 1999 capture of word.com/fred/fred.html is still in the Wayback Machine.

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