uXu

» see uxu.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Underground eXperts United was founded in Sweden in 1991 by people leaving the Swedish Hackers Association, and for eleven years it did the thing that whole scene did: it released numbered text files. No website at first and no publisher behind it. A file got a number and an ASCII logo at the top, then went out to whichever boards would carry it.

The early material lands exactly where Swedish teenagers in 1991 reading about Cult of the Dead Cow would land: bombs and hardware, plus descriptions of the computer scene they were sitting in. What makes uXu worth a grave is what came after that. The subjects widened into diary entries and interviews, then into philosophy and song lyrics, and the group kept the same file numbering the whole way, so the archive reads as one continuous document of a small circle of people getting older in public across nearly a decade. The textfiles.com mirror that carries them says exactly that about it.

There is no sign-up here and no user count, so the scale is small by any modern measure: 617 releases in English and more than a hundred in Swedish, written under handles. The Chief founded it. Phearless, Bravemoore and The GNN are among the names on the files.

I was not in this. My modem arrived in 1998, into a web that had already swallowed the boards these files circulated on, and a Swedish group writing in English for other Swedes had no route to Ankara anyway. Reading them now costs nothing, which is the one mercy of the format. The whole run sits in a single open directory, still numbered in the order it was handed out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ six hundred and seventeen files ~

The last release is numbered 617 and it is an index. It was not a farewell, it was housekeeping: a catalog of everything the group had published, compiled by Bravemoore of The GNN and dated 24 May 2002. It is the fortieth index uXu had issued.

It opens with a nursery rhyme about rowing a boat gently down the stream, and then with an apology. You have been waiting for too long, the writer says, but wait no more. The twelve months behind them had been "an exciting, neverending display of life's little surprises", with people breaking up and breaking down. Then comes a promise of poetry in the release, and then the list. Nobody working on it writes as though they expect it to be the last one.

~ nothing to see here ~

The Wikipedia article gives the group a formation range of 1991 to 1992 and a dissolution of 2002, which is the sort of imprecision an object with no legal existence earns. There is no company to strike off and no press release to date. The only hard date anywhere is the one at the top of file 617.

uxu.se does still answer. It returns twenty bytes, and the twenty bytes say "nothing to see here." That is either an administrator's placeholder or the shortest tombstone anyone in this scene ever wrote, and having read how these people wrote, I would not bet against the second.

What survives is the archive, which is more than almost any commercial site from the same years can claim. textfiles.com carries the whole run under one directory, numbered in order, including the index that closed it. A group that never incorporated and never charged anybody anything is fully readable twenty four years later, and the services that did both are not.

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