Rich Rosen

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Rich Rosen (born May 13, 1956) is a software developer and an author on the subject of web development, who was an early high-volume contributor to Usenet newsgroups.

The volume of Usenet postings Rosen produced led to rumors that many people were actually using his account, or that he was an AI program produced by Bell Labs (where Rosen worked during the 1980s) to dramatically increase the amount of Usenet traffic and thus augment AT&T's long distance telephone revenues.^[1] Weekly statistics collected during his heyday often showed that he, by himself, was responsible for more than 2% of the entire volume of Usenet postings. The phrase "We are all Rich Rosen" was coined during this period and persisted as a Usenet catchphrase for a number of years.

Rosen wrote in a number of newsgroups on a variety of topics, most particularly music and religion. Among his contributions:

The Book of Ubizmo and the religion of Ubizmatism, a parody of the extremes associated with mainstream organized religions.
The story of Toejam Jawallaby, a fictitious musician who was the winner of several bogus "greatest guitarist of all time" polls, whose exploits were later expanded upon in the newsgroup rec.music.jazz.
Several musical compositions that appeared on the first Usenet compilation tape, a little net.music (1985), including A Fair Exchange and Vegetableland (which was ostensibly performed by the aforementioned Toejam Jawallaby).

He also claims responsibility for several Usenet April Fool's jokes.

Rosen was associated with a list of rules called Rich Rosen's Rules of Netnews Debating, which was not so much a set of guidelines to follow when posting, but more of a statement (like Godwin's Law) about the irrational and often obnoxious behavior often observed in Usenet discussions (which Rosen himself admittedly engaged in). He was known for participating in (some would say "inciting") numerous flame wars with other Usenet contributors, including the notorious "Brahms Gang" (a pair of equally loquacious mathematics graduate students from Berkeley). His verbal battles with the Brahms Gang in particular were sometimes referred to as "The War of the Rosens".

He was also known for his variety of frequently-changing .signature files, including:

Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen.^[2]
Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.
Now I've lost my train of thought, I'll have to catch the bus of thought.
echo "This is not a pipe." | cat - >/dev/tty^[3]

Rosen had both advocates and detractors. People either liked his postings and enjoyed his writing or hated his postings and considered him a threat to the future of netnews. His voluminous output and frequently abrasive postings led many to seek his removal from Usenet. He was never actually banned, censored or otherwise prevented from posting, but his e-mail address was used on the man page for the netnews "expire" command as an example of how this command could be used to delete all postings from a particular user. The use of his address in this manner was viewed by some as an endorsement of censorship and it was eventually removed.

His notoriety also led Howard Rheingold to use his name in A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community (an article propagated through its inclusion in the Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet) as an example of how people use kill files:

… putting the name of a person or topic header in a ``kill file'' (aka ``bozo filter'') means you will never see future contributions from that person or about that topic. You can simply choose to not see any postings from Rich Rosen, or that feature the word ``abortion'' in the title.

A column by Mr. Protocol (Michael O'Brien) in Sun Expert magazine (now called Server/Workstation Expert) used the word "Rosenesque" to describe a person who produces a substantial volume of e-mail messages large enough to overwhelm a local network.

The Net.Legends FAQ says:

How can a Net.Legends list omit Rich Rosen? I think he still holds the record for amount of spontaneous, germane text in a single newsgroup (net.philosophy).

In contrast, one system administrator wrote an article entitled "Proposed deletion of Rich Rosen":

If net.bizarre and net.flame were threats to the networks's continued existence, then Rich Rosen is doubly so. … Rich Rosen's volume is enormous. His postings comprise two percent of the network's volume. … Expressed as a raw number of bytes per week, the number is horrendous. It is impossible for one man to produce this much cogent thought in a week. Speaking only for myself (perhaps a poor comparison) I don't think I could even type that fast. … Due to his high volume and near-total lack of redeeming value, I propose that Rich Rosen be removed from USENET. In order to preserve the usual facade of democracy, I'm doing this as a poll. …

On the other hand, an article by Thomas Richardson from 1995^[1] said:

Rosen was particularly noteworthy, because he posted pages [and] pages of coherent material in just about every group I read. … This was back when you could read the entire Usenet feed in a single afternoon. That doesn't explain how Rosen managed to post on every subject, though. I think he must have been a speed typist or he must have had some kind of augmented metabolism or something. … He also managed to stay coherent and to largely avoid repeating himself. Maybe there really was no Rich Rosen. Maybe Dennis Ritchie was just playing a weird joke on everybody.

Today, Rosen is married and lives once again in New Jersey. He is "retired" from posting to Usenet, but he still writes on the subject of web application development and still records his own music.

[edit] Publications

Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices, Leon Shklar, Richard Rosen, 2003, Wiley, ISBN 0-471-48656-6 - classified as "General Web Site Development").

[edit] Notes

^ ^a ^b Reference to quoted article about Rich Rosen by Tom Richardson
^ Misquoted in Bill Jefferys' book Discovering Astronomy as "Many things are possible, but only a few things actually happen."
^ A pun on Magritte's famous painting as applied to pipes in the Unix_shell.