ABOUT THE METAL AE
by Nuclear Gerbil

Before there was high-speed internet in the home, there was dial-up, which 
involved using clunky audio modems over plain old telephone "land lines" 
(remember those?). You did not look up numbers on the internet; you had to 
find someone who knew one, and you might find more through that. The 
mainstream media, who were just about your only source of information, 
were not very helpful. They might accuse you of being a hacker just for 
wanting to call one.

At the same time, heavy metal was hard to discover through public information 
sources. Most magazines eschewed it; Rolling Stone only grudgingly covered it 
and then usually by insulting it. Mainstream society considered it music for 
morons and criminals. There were a few magazines, but they tended to focus 
on the stadium hard rock and older heavy metal, not the new genres of speed 
metal and thrash, and later nascent death metal.

In the stores, you could find Motley Crue, Queensryche, AC/DC (but you 
might get carded for it), Iron Maiden, Metallica, Anthrax, Kreator, Van 
Halen, Megadeth, Rigor Mortis, Prong and sometimes, Slayer. If you wanted 
DRI, you had to go to a metal-only store that would order it directly from 
Rotten Records. Same for Bathory, Sepultura, Hellhammer, Pestilence or 
Deicide.

During the period of 1982-1990, the Metal AE was the biggest source of metal 
information for many of us. One of the first sites for intelligent metalheads 
to meet, it was also the first lyrics and tab archive for this unique genre. 
Where most metal information is corporate pablum, it was one of the few 
voices with a zeal for heavy music. No ads, no morality, no religion, and no 
rules - it was flaming lawlessness on the digital frontier.

If you were able to cobble together a primitive computer and modem setup, 
and maybe phreak a couple k0dez for the call, you could find relatively 
recent Apple ][ warez, textfiles and a rudimentary message system consisting 
of uploaded text files with "from" and "to" information in their filenames. 
Sometimes the strangest thrill could be had from logging to another 143k 
disk drive than the default, knowing that on the lesser-visited reaches
of this board often the most interesting stuff appeared.

War dialers, tiny term programs, hacking utilities and operating system patches. 
Rare interviews with Metallica and Slayer, back then "the heaviest shit" anyone 
had ever heard of. The Metal AE was a great place for all of these. Now there 
can be nothing like it: we are as inundated in information as we were once 
parched for it. But if you use the internet to find information about metal 
today, you are using one of the descendants of this great dial-up system, 
The Metal AE.