William Gibson's AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed

Bud Cook writes "While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem's initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete 'run,' as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA's public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There's also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself."

Comments

Why the bigotry?

[kimvette]

I don't understand why there are so many bigoted articles on this web site. You guys are a bunch of racist. Why the hell are you all throwing around racist slurs like "black holes?" Good grief. Why can't we simply refer to them as "luminescence-challenged singularities" or something else which isn't so racist? You've offended my hyper-sensitive politically-correct psyche!

Now excuse me while I go emo and sulk for a bit.