Kibo

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About

James "Kibo" Parry^[1] is a humorist who was an early Internet celebrity for his wacky hijinks on Usenet in the late 1980s and early 1990s.^[2]^[3]^[4]

Online History

Kibo Is God

Kibo would quickly respond to any post that mentioned his name, using grep to search the entire Usenet feed for such posts. This led to the joking impression that Kibo was an omniscient being akin to the Usenet Oracle, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and Bob. This in turn led to the creation of alt.religion.kibology^[5]^[6] by Kibo and his fans.

Kibo's Signature

Kibo's posts would often be followed by an incredibly long signature^[7] as a parody of the increasingly detailed and self-aggrandizing signatures of other Internet users.

Happynet Proclamation

In 1992, Kibo issued the Happynet Proclamation^[8] proposing to reorganize Usenet into three top-level domains for "bozo", "non-bozo", and "mega-bozo" discussion groups.

1992 Presidential Campaign

Kibo ran a fake online campaign for President in 1992 to parody the strong third-party showing of Ross Perot. An FTP archive stored copies of Kibo's online statements alongside the speeches of Clinton, Bush, and Perot, and a copy of this archive was briefly served by the official Internet site of the White House until the Libertarian Party complained about the inclusion of Kibo's statements while their own candidate's statements were excluded.^[9]

Reputation

Kibo was profiled in about two dozen newspaper and magazine articles from 1993 to 1997^[9], beginning with a September 1993 profile in Wired Magazine.^[10]