A Decade of MrMan.net

Because I was somewhat depressed, broke, and then suddently busy, I didn’t realise that on 2 March 2024 mrman.net celebrated it’s tenth whole year of rincing my pockets for money.

What an exciting time, and this december mmn.on.ca has it’s 24th CIRA anniversary, then May 2025 mmn.ca celebrates it’s first. How they grow up.

I think for this momentious occasion we should revisit the origins of MMN, that being short for Mr.ManNET (occasionally stylised as MrMan_NET_). It was a decent name when I picked it, when I was say, around the age of 10-12.

Where did the name come from, well me and a friend Josh, plasticine little men that we used to throw in front of cars and record the hilarity with my video camera. There exists the original VHS tapes hand edited, then later on the tapes I edited through a crappy movie maker. Do I have any of that with me ? Absolutely not, but I do have the very expensive royalty free music CD I bought when I was really going for those videos and making the RealPlayer video files available on the early internet.

There are also some photos that exist too, like the ones above.

Anyways, when I found my first Wildcat! BBS back in those days, I decided that is what I wanted to do, so I did it and when I picked out a name for my board it was MrManNET / MMN. The details of how the internet presence started, might have been on citéweb, could have been on Interlog‘s webspace, who the fuck knows. Then in 1997 I figured out how to register free domains back in the good old days of UBC running .ca, started off with mmn.toronto.on.ca and then eventually I got mmn.on.ca.

MrMan.Net had always been out of reach, until by chance it hit an auction in 2014 and I won it for 14$.

And there you go, things go full circle and they last longer than you expected.

For this joyus occasion, I’m going to try and hack together a Plume instance that runs through the mmn.ca domain because I’m that fucking crazy. But not as crazy as Josh