http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/taotmeme.html
Although I had taken a programming class at the university, and I had coded some BASIC on my brother's Trash-80, I was not free to program to my heart's content until I bought a Coleco ADAM computer with built-in daisywheel printer and cassette storage-tapes. I wrote long programs and printed them out on the letter-quality printer. My favorite program was the World Lit Language Tutor for learning Latin. Some outfit back East almost bought the program from me for publication and marketing, but they wanted me to create a lot more lessons than the one included with the program, so we broke off negotiations. I later rewrote the program for the Commodore Amiga, and it went into limited circulation. The Coleco ADAM took on for me a memetic signficance when I purchased the add-on of a state-of-the-art 300-baud acoustic modem for calling out to other computers. Coleco had been hoping to offer a 600-baud modem, but it came out as 300-baud. Very soon other computers were offering 1200 and 2400 baud modems, and the Coleco ADAM was dying on the vine. The Apple Macintosh was not out yet, and IBM clones were sweeping the market. I did not care, because 300 baud was fast enough for me.
Here in Seattle we had a free newspaper called the Puget Sound Computer User. Each month it had a list of telephone numbers where you could dial out by modem to a Bulletin Board System (BBS). Suddenly the Mentifex AI memes were off and running. Sometimes a BBS would have a connection to something called Fido-net, that stretched all the way around the world. I started posting about Mentifex AI on one BBS after another. Some people on one BBS invited me to join them on their own special literary BBS called Invisible Seattle, which later morphed into an archival Web site. Another BBS was being run on an Apple ][ by an individual even stranger than myself, who saw me typing into his BBS called The Constant Society and broke into the session to begin a direct on-screen conversation with me about how to say various things in Latin, like ancilla Dei for the handmaiden of God. It was very rare that the operator of a computer BBS would interrupt me and communicate directly, but each operator had the ability to observe user behavior in real time. Often a BBS would have a twit key for bumping any user off the system if he was acting like a twit. One BBS operator was quite amazed that I was using a 300-baud Coleco ADAM to communicate on his BBS. Another operator broke into my session and demanded to know what I was looking for, because he was operating a public BBS but he wanted me to hurry up and log off so that his friends could call the BBS. It was a mark of great prestige to host your own BBS that could become the central meeting place of an on-line community. The operator of the Constant Society BBS, however, had his own wild and woolly memetic agenda and he wanted to recruit me to help him formulate certain memes correctly in the ancient Latin language that I knew inside-out. I could read, write, think and sometimes even dream in Latin after taking Latin for eight years and teaching Latin for four years. The head of the Constant Society (membership: two individuals) invited me to come and meet him face-to-face at the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) in the University District. KM1, as he called himself (for Keymaster One), was an eternal student who lingered on in the math department and staved off earning his degree as long as possible. His main haunt was the now gone but then glorious coffee house called the Last Exit on Brooklyn. He wanted me to join his tribe of acolytes consisting then of himself and one other guy, a love-struck undergraduate who wanted me to help him impress his would-she-be girlfriend by sending her "Amor Omnia Vincit" as a message in Latin. KM1 eventually got written up in a book called Mathematical Cranks by Dudley Underwood, who told the world about the handwritten (not typeset) book about mathematical constants that KM1 self-published and advertised on the back cover of the main academic journal for mathematicians, with an enomous Greek letter Pi as the graphic motif of his message. University libraries ordered copies of the book because it was advertised in so prestigious a journal, but many purchasers were disappointed to find out how shoddily put together the book was.