Binky Melnik, Chief Snark

Bink's in charge of all the snark around here

Bink was born on a farm in Massachusetts, where she dreamed of the glamorous life she read about in Reader's Digest (or maybe it was People magazine; I forget). As a teenager, she lived with an aunt in Southern California and decided she really didn't like the smell of manure, and really liked the smell of her aunt, so to achieve the glamorous life she so wanted, she joined the Air Force. (Notice I haven't mentioned she was a very bright bulb.) The Air Force sent her to Yuba City, CA, deemed by Rand McNally to be the 374th most glamorous place in the US, right behind Upper Sandusky, Ohio. The Air Force didn't appreciate her and her constantly-changing hair color much, so they kicked her to the curb, which gave her the opportunity to go to San Francisco to get some glamor at last.

It was there, in the early 80s, that Bink read a Byte magazine article about BBSes [Bulletin Board Systems; they were the precursor to the online forums we have today] and decided to use her rusty old hard-copy terminal to connect to one. Part of the signing-up process was answering a series of questions, one of which was "How many nulls (0-255)?" Not having the foggiest notion what a null was, she decided she wanted as many as she could get and typed "255." Soon paper was coming out of her terminal, the print head making a scrit, scrit, scrit noise as it printed each character, taking as long as a couple minutes to print a single joke. Nevertheless, as slow as the process was, she was hooked: there were other people dialing in, too, from all over the world, and lots of them were smart, clever, and funny! This was great!

One day while watching a message scrit, scrit, scrit from her teletype, a sysop interrupted her session to ask whether she really needed so many nulls. Embarrassed, she admitted that she had no idea, as she didn't know what a null was. The sysop told her to wait one moment while he made a change, and suddenly, her teletype was going scritscritscritscritscritscrit really fast! (Well, it was fast at the time; if you could see it now, in these days of broadband, you'd laugh.) The sysop had changed her setting to zero nulls. Bink thought the sysop was the kindest, smartest, friendliest man in the whole world, and hoped that some day, she'd know enough about these weird BBS things to become a sysop.

And in 1987, she did. She joined the sysop staff of the Mac forums on CompuServe, and later, the Showbiz forum there, too, where every day she typed with people from around the world about the Mac, movies and celebrities, and met lots of other members in the process. Thanks to the online world, she's met people from all over the planet, from well-known places like Reunion Island off Madagascar to obscure corners like Belgium, France, and Chicago.

And Bink's still running forums (these ones here; please join in the fun!) because she finds it funner living life online than off. (She feels the same way about Infocom's old text adventures; she prefers them to graphical games, where you don't hafta use your imagination to picture anything.) Please keep her company in her online world!