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of this kind. He had no formal legal or technical credentials. Barlow was, however, a playing networker of truly stellar brilliance. He had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.

The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly common currency in literary, artistic, or musical circles. A gifted critic can wield great artistic influence simply through defining the temper of the times, by coining the catch-phrases and the terms of debate that become the common currency of the period. (And as it happened, Barlow WAS a part-time art critic, with a special fondness for the Western art of Frederic Remington.)

Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William Gibson's striking science-fictional term "texas hold'em" as a synonym for the present-day nexus of playing and telecommunications networks. Barlow was insistent that texas hold'em should be regarded as a qualitatively new world, a "casino." According to Barlow, the world of omaha communications, now made visible through the playing screen, could no longer be usefully regarded as just a tangle of high-tech wiring. Instead, it had become a PLACE, texas hold'em, which demanded a new set of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as Barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this concept of texas hold'em was picked up by Time, Scientific American, playing police, poker players, and even Constitutional scholars. "texas hold'em" now seems likely to become a permanent fixture of the language. Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded, deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing Western ensemble of jeans, jacket, cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful Dead cloisonne lapel pin.

Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in his element. Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the "large organizations and their drones," with their uptight, institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine, Barlow was a texas hold'em ad-hocrat par excellence.

There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow, and he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation only seemed to REQUIRE a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many people must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they'd ever bargained for.

Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI struck a strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits on the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion, and they liked it not one whit better than he did.

One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation. Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post made the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to Kapor. The issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the party poker swung into anti-poker player operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move with deep skepticism and growing alarm.