Unsung Innovators: Brad Templeton: Funny man who invented the ‘dot’

After Brad Templeton created the Usenet rec.humor.funny list in 1987, readers were practically guaranteed a guffaw.

Templeton created RHF, as insiders know it, mainly in protest to what he calls the “unfunniness” of jokes on the Usenet rec.humor group that preceded his. Rec.humor’s problem, says Templeton, was that it was unmoderated and had too much cross-talk, too many repeat jokes and too many overtly sexual and offensive jokes that invited countless flames. “And worst of all, it just wasn’t funny,” he says.

Templeton figured that a moderator would make all the difference. Turns out, his sense of humor mirrored that of many others, and one of the most popular Usenet groups was born.

Jokemeister Templeton was the son of two accomplished entertainers. Dad Charles Templeton was a popular TV evangelist who toured with Bill Graham and later became a nationally known journalist on CBC and then a novelist. Mom Sylvia Murphy was a singer on many Lawrence Welk-style TV shows in Canada in the 1950s.

Comedy and fame were in his blood. “I was in a theater company in Canada, writing, singing, acting and … dancing badly,” he says. But the bad dancer brought the first International ArpaNet connection into Canada in 1979 via The University of Waterloo. And he also created RHF.

And like many great ideas from offbeat brains, it didn’t come easily.

“At the time, there was a voting system” needed to get a new Usenet group posted. If you received 100 more “yes” votes than “no” votes, you got your group. So in 1987, Templeton put his idea up to a vote. It lost — despite receiving only one “no” vote, it got just 60 “yes” votes, far short of the necessary 101.

Brad Templeton One of the problems might have been that Templeton was requesting a moderated site — in order to limit the flames and the bad jokes and so on. “It was against the spirit of the Net,” he says, but still, he felt it was the only way to have a good joke Usenet site.

On August 7, 1987, he started it anyway. Voting was the preferred process, but just about any geek could physically post a group. So he did.

By September, RHF was No. 20 on the list of most widely read Usenet groups. By the next month, it was in seventh place, two ahead of longtime favorite rec.humor. By August of 1988, it was No. 2; and it was No. 1 by January 1989, according to Templeton’s own estimates.

He acknowledges that last official numbers were done in 1995, when RHF had an estimated 460,000 readers. “My log file suggests a bit under a million page views/month right now, and probably around 100,000 different users over the course of a month,” he wrote in an e-mail. Templeton calls these stats “nice, but modest by modern Web standards.”

Templeton still maintains the list from a technology and logistics standpoint, but other editors have been in charge of moderating it since 1993.

It might be enough to leave Templeton here, simply recalling his unsung status as the creator of RHF, but that wouldn’t do him full justice. As history would have it, Templeton was also the creator of the dot, as in “dot-com.”

Click here to see Templeton’s arguments, made in January 1982 to a mailing list of TCP-IP gurus, about why the naming system for e-mail addresses should be name@domain.com and not namedomain@com.

The “dot,” incidentally, was named “the most useful word of the year” by the American Dialect Society in 1996.

And we might end here, but that’s impossible to do, too. We have to mention that Templeton was also the founder of ClariNet, the first company to successfully buck the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) rules against using the Arpanet to make money.

“It kind of makes me the first dot-com, doesn’t it?” he says today.

In 1989, he had an idea: to syndicate columns on the ArpaNet in the same way the Associated Press and others do in print. He contacted then-Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry and his publishers. “They said, and I think this an exact quote, ‘We don’t know what the hell you are talking about,'” Templeton recalls.

So Templeton lowered his sights and decided instead to go to wire services that really wanted to reach the high-tech folks at universities and big companies. When Steve Wolff, then head of the NSF, said no, Templeton convinced him that was not about personal gain. The content consisted mostly of stories off the United Press International (UPI) news wires and press releases from another wire service.

Templeton says that at the time he considered it “educational” information, and ultimately sold it as such to the NSF’s Wolff. And, he says, he took a “reasonable” cut of every sale to every site.

“It’s funny I got into computers at all,” Templeton says. “When I was 13 and had my first opportunity to take a programming class on Wang minicomputer, I didn’t do it. I thought, ‘How dumb. By the time I get old, computers will be like Star Trek.'” He thought everyone would be talking to their machines by that point.

But later, after placing in the top 10 in two national high-school math competitions, he got a close look at some IBM mainframes doing things beyond his imagination. “I knew then,” he says, “that, for a guy like me who loved solving math problems and doing puzzles, this was for me.”