Domain url jfk.uk available to anyone with UK street address

page 21
....
The Grand Lodge of Russia registered freemasonry.ru, but freemasonry.us was registered

on 24 April 2002 by a Mr George W. Mephis of Middletown NY who, like Thevasagayam,

has currently parked it as a link farm.

Other names have also been lost. Affiliated with the International Guild of Masonic

Webmasters was a portal website, gomasonry.com : ‘Your gateway to worldwide masonic

resources’ with, at one time, 1558 links to masonic sites. The original owners, Michael R. Poll

and the pseudonymous Martin Barbador, allowing the domain to expire, it was purchased on

20 February 2004 by this-domain-for-sale.com, who blocked access to its pages stored at

archives.org, and listed it for sale on 25 September 2007 for $30,088.135

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dungeons+and+dragons+%22george+w+mephis%22

The Internet

The Internet is far more than the World Wide Web. With the first bulletin board dating

from 1978,4 the Internet, as a public forum, has been with us for thirty years. Before the

Internet there was ARPAnet, DARPAnet, and other networks. But these do not really concern

us, unless someone, while backing up an old tape-drive, unearths a text message perhaps

inviting the recipient to a lodge meeting.5 The earliest MUDs (Multi-User Dimension)

appeared in 1977, running on various local systems, and, predominantly used by players of

adventure or ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ games. They also provided chat rooms. MUDs are

mentioned here for two reasons. First, because MUDs introduced a generation to computer

communications, and second, MUDs later evolved into a level of computer-based virtual

communities such as Second Life, an aspect of the web addressed later in this paper.

Rather than describe the technology of the Internet, a level of knowledge on the reader’s

part will be assumed: computers were connected to other computers through telephone lines.

The rest is detail.6

Pioneers

Those freemasons working in the computer field during the 1960s and 1970s were, of

course, among the first to hear about what Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry

Barlow later dubbed ‘cyberspace’. The term, e-m@son, originally ‘eMason’, wasn’t coined

by Gordon Charlton until 1995, but freemasons, discussing and practicing Freemasonry, had

been online for years. Only a few will be noted here.

Joining Freemasonry in 1979, at the age of twenty-one, Ron Blaisdell worked using

ARPAnet in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Gopher networks in the early 1990s.

Blaisdell’s first gopher site with hypertext markup language (html) support, going live in

February 1993, was a masonic Frequently Asked Questions file (FAQ) developed by members

of the CompuServe Masonry Forum. First uploaded in April 1994, his website rust.net/’ronb/

may qualify as the first masonic website.7 He registered hiram.net in 1995 and migrated his

website but, like so many others, lost his domain when the site registrar Network Solutions

initiated onerous registration fees in September 1995. Unlike so many others, he was able to

reclaim his domain on 9 September 1998.8 Creating the Michigan masonic mailing list in

19949—currently with over 500 members—and uploading the Grand Lodge of Michigan’s

first website in 1996, he currently hosts some 125 masonic websites.

Styling it the e-m@son webzine, Rick Kasparek, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, created

freemasonry.org in November 1995, calling it the Great Light of the World Wide Web or

‘GLoWWW’.10 It was later administered by Blaisdell who assisted Kasparek in transferring

the domain name to the Philalethes Society in 1997. He continues to administer the guest

book, called the ‘Welcome Wall’—where visitors can add their names and comments—and

update E-M@son Links. Migrated to hiram.net on 9 September 1998, and now found at

links.hiram.net, E-M@son Links currently provides over 2,000 links to masonic sites.

In response to the growing presence of freemasons online, Rick Kasparek, author of ‘The

Eminent Arrival of the Masonic Internet’,11 and Ron Blaisdell, also started the Operative Web

Masons’ Guild (OWMG) in 1996. Intended as a resource for masonic webmasters, the Guild

is currently represented at mastermason.com and owmg.org but is considered inactive.

Dr. Peter G. Trei came online in late 1978, registering his first proper account in early

1979 on one of the DEC-20s at Columbia University. Joining Freemasonry in 1988, within a

year he had created the Masonic Digest, with Volume 1 : Issue 1, released on 16 November

1989. 12

A career member of the US Navy, David Allen Stites of El Cajon, California had used

MilNet in its early days, but it was not until after he retired that he acquired his first dial-up

Internet account in January 1988. In 1991 he set up a section of the public File Transfer

Protocol (FTP) server on his personal Internet Service Provider (ISP) to make selected

masonic-related texts available under the auspices of the Southern California Research Lodge.

His rôle in creating MasNet is detailed later.13


One of the first masonic leaders to recognize the potential for Freemasonry was Allen E.

Roberts who wrote in 1983: ‘Computers are in! Everywhere we turn we’re finding them....