Welcome to alancooke.org, my father's posthumous home on the web.

Alan Cooke would have been an "early adopter" of the internet, but he died in 1989 before this incredible communication tool was available to the general public. I remember a summer afternoon in 1985 at Hochelaga. I had just moved back to the United States after fourteen years in Cambridge, England. Neil Thompson and I had driven up from Neil's house in New Jersey for a visit. Neil had already found out that my father had a modem -- 1200 baud, I think it was -- connected to Christophe, my father's IBM PC. Neil had a list of phone numbers with him. He dialed one up. The modem clicked and sputtered and finally connected to a Montreal BBS -- a bulletin board service. Neil told my father to sit down and type in a greeting. A complete stranger connected to the BBS through a phone line from somewhere in Montreal, or perhaps the States, or Europe, or Australia, replied. Anyone else who happened to be connected to the BBS could read along or join in.

I don't know what they discussed but I do remember my father typing away at his usual 80+ words per minute. He was offering the stranger advice. I had never seen a BBS in action before, and I was hooked. Was my father, too? Perhaps the person on the other end of the line didn't have enough to offer to keep him interested after Neil and I had left. He didn't use the boards when I lived with him a few months later.

But I do know that my father would have loved the internet of today, despite its huge annoyances: advertisements, misinformation, trolls, viruses, idiocy, spam, spam, and more spam. He would have loved wikipedia.org. He would have had a chuckle over uncyclopedia.org. He probably would have bookmarked google.com as his home page. And I hope he would have admired the site I've been running for the last decade on the English rock group, The Fall. I certainly inherited my information-gathering and -sharing instincts from him.

My father would have loved the internet because of the sort of website that I hope alancooke.org will become. Indeed, he had a similar idea for Hochelaga and his infant journal, Arcana Poli. He wanted to create a forum for intelligent, thoughtful persons to talk with one another about important ideas. These discussions wouldn't necessarily have been about The North. They would have been about global issues: education, bureaucracy, psychology, literature, religion, health care, technology, the environment, nutrition, government, human rights, philosophy, music, mankind's future, the list goes on and on.

I'll probably expand other areas of the site over time, but its real purpose is the alancooke.org forum. If you remember my father, I hope you'll use the forum not only to share your memories, but to discuss whatever you like with others who also remember him.

Please follow this link to read the forum. In case such a forum is new to you, please take a few minutes to explore the page to see how things works. In brief, there are (at present; I may add more depending on how popular my idea proves to be) two categories: one for Alan Cooke-related posts (including yet another "welcome" message from me) and the other for everything else (including an "introduce yourself" thread). Any words in dark blue is a link. There's a little "HELP" tab that may be use. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it after a short while, but if you do find yourself still at sea, please email me and I'll try to help.

If you remember my father with fondness, I sincerely hope you'll register and join the discussion. There are a couple of "register" links near the top of the forum page, on the left.

And please spread the word to those you think should know about the forum. I've tracked down the email addresses of a couple dozen of my father's friends whom I'll invite (along with members of my family, of course), but there are surely dozens more whom I don't know and who may want to join us. Thank you.

Stefan Cooke
18 February 2007
stefan@alancooke.org