MindVox
A New York BBS and early internet provider, launched in 1991 by two former members of the hacker group Legion of Doom.
Patrick Kroupa and Bruce Fancher opened MindVox in Manhattan as a commercial gathering place with multi-user chat, forums and eventually access to Usenet and the rest of the internet. The founders' past was part of the brand: the system was marketed with a cocky, cyberpunk-tinged attitude that set it apart from both the sedate university networks and the family-friendly commercial services.
MindVox drew plenty of press in the early 1990s and attracted hackers, journalists and the merely curious. Like ECHO across town, it showed that online communities were already fully formed before the web arrived — and how hard it became for them to survive once it did.