This is a home for projects involving topics and ideas that don't have an appropriate home on an educational server or tied in with any company.
This machine at Stanford, "techno.stanford.edu", also soon became a home to a number of other mailing lists, such as the Intelligent Dance Music list, and the archive was expanded to include information about all things rave- and techno-related. About the same time I created a couple of accounts for certain folks such as Mike Brown, who were interested in helping develop different areas of the site.
In 1993 Stanford decided they wanted back control of their Sparc 1, which had become totally engaged in traffic from these lists, and I decided it was time to go out and get my own server and set it up on the net. I was working for Wired Magazine at the time, maintaining their web server, so I was able to get permission to set up my own server on the same subnet, connected to the Internet at T1 speeds. Since that time I moved on to HotWired, and then on to a company I cofounded called Organic, where this machine now rests. Hyperreal.com (the name comes from a "Shamen" song) is a Pentium 90 running BSDI 2.0, with 6 gigs of disk space and 96 megs of ram, for the gearheads out there. :)
Techno.stanford.edu was a great machine, but it prevented me from doing something I really wanted to do, which was distribute the workload of maintaining the site among a larger group of people, and serve as a home for others in the culture to spread awareness of their ideas too. This was mainly because disk space was limited and because I couldn't create more than a couple of accounts. Hyperreal is a much different situation - I have a lot of disk space for archiving and I can give out as many accounts as I want now. Woohoo!
As you look around Hyperreal, keep in mind that the vast resources here now have all been contributed by people in their spare times. It's a little rough around the edges, but many of us like it like that.