Remember the elitist stink when AOL proposed to offer its users web access? Remember Wired's visionary IPO? Remember Mosaic?! I do. I also remember distributing Crank #1 as a text-only file via
e-mail and sending it to other AOL users as a DocMaker file back in 1994. Ancient history on your time line; the backyard of mine.

I'd bet my balls you don't know how godawful long it took for a 300-baud modem to dump a text file from your local BBS onto your monitor. A 300-baud modem--1/186th the speed of your 56K modem--cost $300 back in 1984, when I ran "The Party Zone" BBS out of North Jersey on my Atari 800 (best viewed in "AtAscii," aka Atari ascii). The Party Zone was part of a BBS network that specialized in providing hacking tips, long distance calling codes, cracked software and housing documents which were then considered subversive. (Text docs such as "How To Make A Pipe Bomb" and "How To Get A Fake I.D." were subversive at the time.) My comrades and I were genuinely afraid of Federal authorities sneaking onto our boards and tapping our phone lines. This was a realistic fear for the hardcore hackers, phreakers and crossover participants such as me.

For all practical purposes, the Internet didn't exist.

Everything was different in 1994. Ten years after I'd shut down my own first attempt at adolescent subversion, subversives had become commonplace. The BBS was just about dead. (Sorry, BTF.) But I was still ahead of you. I put Crank #1 online at the same time I printed it, making Crank--as far as I can tell--the very first printed zine to be online. I'd be interested in any arguments to the contrary, but you'd best be prepared to back it up. For instance--not that this alone is proof positive--you'll note that my pal Roy Batchelor had the vision to register crank.com in 1994. Not even factsheet5.com was registered until more than one year later. Remember: back in 1994, the world wide web was an academic and scientific tool. Netscape wasn't around; Explorer wasn't even on Gates' product horizon. I used Mosaic to view the first incarnation of crank.com, which, at the time, was housed at btf.com/crank, part of the Burn This Flag BBS family of content. As soon as personal, pseudo-professional domain hosting became feasible, Roy moved everything to www.crank.com.

So... Fact: Crank was the very first print zine to go online. If for some reason you refuse to accept that, then try this undisputable, diluted version of that claim: Crank was the first zine to go online at the same time its first issue was printed. If you care to challenge that, then please e-mail me and I'll look into it. Also be sure to send me a copy of your printed zine, dated pre-Feb-1994, because that's my point: I took my print content online years before the New York Times ever suspected that there was a reason to do the same. (Only bOING bOING has been mentioned as a possible competitor for the title of First Zine Online, but--the argument that they were barely a zine notwithstanding--
I don't think they published to print and online simultaneously. They may have had an online presence, but even they didn't dare let their precious printed content go out for free online.)

Send me your naysaying, please. Then I'll check with Network Solutions and decide if you've proven me wrong. But you won't. Because Crank was it. Crank was the first printed zine that published simultaneously online. Everyone was afraid of losing their paid print readers if they gave away the content for free. I knew better. So suck my balls. I also knew that the AOL IPO was golden; we all did. We just didn't have the cash to put down.