David Huffman taught there. In a certain niche of computerdom, Huffman was famous as the creator of Huffman coding, a compression routine that software products such as Stacker use to double the space available on hard drives. Music isn’t exactly a low-bandwidth use of the Net. Compression routines of one kind or another are de rigueur for the transmission of high-quality sound—not just because of the space that the material requires, but also because big files take longer to transmit. At the time Patterson moved to Santa Cruz, he wasn’t using Hoffman compression on the Net or posting CD-quality sound from hundreds of musicians through an IUMA-style operation. But like other techies, he was posting files in the synthesized MIDI format. “The stuff I put up there, it sounded like a bad Casio keyboard playing our songs. It really wasn’t very representative at all. I’d just sit there at my computer, compose ’em on the computer, and upload ’em on the Net. I posted them to a couple of news groups, like alt.binaries.sound and things like that and basically got no response at all.” Jeff Patterson was reading the supermodel newsgroup when he saw a posting from Rob Lord in favor of Kate Moss, the model that so many of the regulars considered too bony. Patterson replied. “We were both huge Kate Moss fans.” Lord sent him some e-mail talking about how Kate Moss should be the “queen of supermodels.” People on the Net have a custom of leaving “signatures” at the bottom of messages—places where they may post their address or phone number, or an I-don’t-speak-for-IBM disclaimer, or quote somebody to support them or deride them—and Patterson took quick notice of Lord’s “.sig.” It alluded to “MPEG Audio Compression, 16 to 1 CD Quality.” “And,” Patterson recalled, “I was like, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ So I e-mailed him back talking about getting together some Moss pictures, and in passing I asked him about MPEG compression.” MPEG stood for Motion Picture Expert Group—engineers who set standards for audio and video compression. Growing curious, Patterson downloaded software so he could play MPEG through his sound card. The results delighted him, and he spread the news to the other Ugly Mugs. Hey, guys, Patterson said in effect, what if we put our music on the Internet? “They thought it was a pretty good idea. So we decided to chip in together and go ahead and buy the software that we needed to compress MPEG files, because you could get that player for free, but the compressor cost $100. Rob came over to my house, and I told him we were putting our band on the Net, and he was all excited about the whole idea of creating this archive of bands on the Net.“ But of course! Rave-think could reach cyberspace. Something was evident here, something obvious to me, but perhaps not to all the bluenoses and prudish, power-fixated bureaucrats. Patterson and Lord were proving the old wisdom that hormones could drive technology on the Net, or at least the applied variety.