“It appears my client log-on isn’t working! I’m in the airport waiting to board a plane and I really need to contact you folks…”
He was not alone. Someone else wrote “I forgot my username and password. How can i retrieve them? Thanks”. A public relations professional attached a real résumé, carefully noting four and a half years as the media relations point person at Microsoft Canada. A man named Tim asked where to send his child’s college fund, around twenty-five thousand dollars, if he wanted to invest all of it. Another correspondent asked whether the company was traded on any North American stock exchange, and if so, under what symbol.
All of them were writing to E-Com-Con Corp., a computer manufacturer whose flagship product was a processor called the Octium IV, whose second product was a flying car, and whose Chief Executive Officer was the Devil.
And E-Com-Con published their letters.
The company that only existed on television
e-com-con.com was a prop.
Fox built it for the 2001 pilot of The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files spinoff that lasted only thirteen episodes. They put it online months ahead of the broadcast. The Wayback Machine’s first capture of the front page is dated 1 February 2001, a month before the pilot aired, and several of the letters wish the company a merry Christmas, so it was already live and already collecting mail in December 2000.
It is built out of frames, that’s how it was done back then. A 70 pixel header strip across the top, a 118 pixel sidebar next to a 527 pixel content pane, because that is how wide a website was for 640x480 resolutions. There is a teal CLIENT LOGIN box in the sidebar with a Client Name field, a Password field, and a button that does nothing, which is what the man in the airport was fighting with. Underneath it sits a “Forgot Your Password?” link. That, for some reason, loads the reader mail page.
The hack shipped in the HTML
The plot of the pilot turns on the Gunmen breaking into E-Com-Con and defacing its website,
and the production solved that the cheapest and most romantic way available in 2001,
by marking the defacement up inline in the files that were already there.
The corporate line goes in <strike><font color>,
and both versions sit on screen at the same time, permanently.
The executive roster is the best of it. Chairman and CEO becomes The Devil. Chief Financial Officer becomes Lead Embezzler. Senior Vice President, Technical Relations becomes Pendrell’s Plaything. VP of Operations, Middle East Sector becomes Terrorist. And the Chief Engineer, in a caption under a photo from the company holiday party, becomes Bad dancer.
The investor relations section got the same treatment and it is sharper than it has any right to be. On the consolidated balance sheet, “Gas holdings” is struck out and replaced with “Stolen Credit Cards”, and “Current construction” with “Mind-Control Research”. The outlook page opens with the standard forward-looking-statements boilerplate, “The following statements are based on current expectations”, where “based on current expectations” is crossed out and replaced with “LIES!”. Then comes the risk factors paragraph, two hundred words of real SEC filing language about downward cycles and inventory obsolescence and micron process transitions, and the Gunmen annotate the entire thing with a single word.
Gibberish!
Glorious.
On the restored site both layers are still there, and a button switches between them. None of the wording is mine. The toggle is the only new thing.
The jokes that almost got lost
Two of these I would have missed entirely if the readers of 2001 had not found them first. The VP of Operations for the Middle East Sector is named Gizli Dosyalar. That is Turkish for “Secret Files”. It is the title The X-Files runs under in Turkey.
The balance sheet, after several screens of invented numbers, totals liabilities and stockholders’ equity at $10,130. Ten thirteen. Chris Carter’s production company.
A woman writing in from Spain spotted both, twenty-five years ago, in an email that runs down half the page listing every character name she recognised, Betty Templeton and Chrissy Giorgio and Dr. Zama Ishimaru and Modeski and Pendrell, noting that Suzanne Modeski’s biography has her working as a news anchor at KHOU in Houston, the local Fox affiliate. She signs off “Well Merry Christmas and Trust no one.”
Three separate people wrote in about Seven Days in May. One of them just asked, without preamble, “Is Burt Lancaster on staff?”
The best of the letters are the ones written in character. An Assistant Director named Kersh requests specifications on the ductless cooling systems, and adds that should any correspondence arrive from one F. Mulder, it should be forwarded on, where this does not violate federal privacy laws. A job application arrives signed Lee Harvey. Another, from Dana Sculder. Someone asks to be added to the company newsletter and signs it Scott. One reader, having worked the whole thing out, suggested that the company “should post correspondences with people who think it’s a real company somewhere so we can all laugh at them.”
Apparently Fox took the note. The internet was beautiful back then.
What I rebuilt
The restoration is a literal copy.
Every .htm file is close to byte for byte what actually shipped,
pulled from the February to August 2001 captures and cross-checked against a later mirror,
with the original stylesheet unmodified and new rules appended at the bottom for the toggle.
The rule I set was that nothing gets invented.
Websites were handcrafted. Developers listened to users, mostly because the volume was low enough that they could. I think we are slowly losing that as AI works its way into the internet.
Four of the nav bars had to be reconstructed, because those four pages were never crawled and the nav bar is generated per page. Each one is the exact table and script pattern copied from the two that did survive, with a different item marked active. And one more thing. The Octium IV product graphic survived only with the defacement already on it, so the toggle had nothing to switch back to. I painted the graffiti out by hand. That image is the one thing on the restored site that never existed.
What’s been lost
Four of the five executive headshots are gone. Only Suzanne Modeski’s survived.
Gone too are the product photos, the header background tile, Pendrell’s signature graphic and his large photograph on the History page, the team photo, both divider graphics, four of the five holiday party photos, and two of the party pages entirely, captions and all, because those were never crawled either.
They are all still on the restored site, as broken image tags pointing at the original filenames. That is what survived, so that is what is there.
If you have any of it, a magazine scan, a copy from somewhere the crawlers did not reach, I would genuinely love to see it.
You can read the ending off the Server header
The site stayed up, untouched, for two and a half years after the show was cancelled. The front page was crawled thirty-four times between February 2001 and 26 October 2003, always the same site, nobody maintaining it, the registration quietly renewed on somebody’s budget line.
Then it stops.
On 11 February 2004 the domain answers with a 301 for the first time. Six weeks later a capture of the redirect carries this:
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_pointer/0.8 PHP/4.3.2
X-Redirected-By: mod_pointer - http://stderr.net/mod_pointer/
Location: http://mi-solutions.rite2u.com/
mod_pointer is a domain parking module.
Its whole job is to sit on an expired domain and bounce whoever still shows up to a reseller.
The header even links to its own homepage, which is the most 2004 detail in the entire investigation.
Fox stopped paying the renewal.
For a website about a conspiracy, that is a spectacularly boring cause of death.
After that you can watch the domain change hands without reading a single page,
because each new owner brings a different stack.
By February 2006 it is still mod_pointer, now serving a parking page instead of a redirect.
By May 2008 it answers as Microsoft-IIS/6.0 with X-Powered-By: ASP.NET.
By June 2013 it is Apache/2.0.51 (Fedora) running PHP 5.2.9,
and the pages it is serving are a conspiracy blog,
mining the phrase “lone gunman” for search traffic.
There is one more thing in the record I cannot explain. The domain without the hyphen, e-comcon.com, started serving real mirrored copies of the original pages around 2008. Someone unrelated to Fox re-hosted the archived HTML and left it up. It is the closest thing to a predecessor this project has, and I have no idea who did it.
The letters
The reader who suggested Fox publish the confused correspondence was writing to a prop with a three-month shelf life, and got a permanent page out of it.
That page is the reason any of this was worth rebuilding. Everything else on the site is a production designer’s joke about processors and flying cars, and a very good one. But the letters have something special. The only place where actual strangers walked in and interacted with it. A small place, on a small internet.
The site is back up, mail page included, broken images and all. Enjoy.
“Well Merry Christmas and Trust no one.”
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