ICBM address

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated The Usenet (UUCP) mapping project, Usenet sig blocks · Also known as missile address; ICBM:; <meta name="ICBM">

What it is

Hacker slang for your exact position on the globe, given as latitude and longitude, usually precise to a second of arc (about 30 metres). ICBM stands for intercontinental ballistic missile, the long-range nuclear weapon the United States and the Soviet Union pointed at each other during the Cold War. Calling your coordinates your ICBM address meant: this is where to aim the missile if you want to hit me. People put it at the bottom of their posts as a joke.

Where it came from

Usenet was a discussion system, started in 1980, where computers passed messages to each other along phone-line links. To keep track of those links, the Usenet mapping project asked each site to fill in a registration form, and one field asked for its longitude and latitude. The answers were used to draw accurate maps of the network on a plotter. Users started calling that field their ICBM address, and the name stuck. It was recorded in the Jargon File, a shared dictionary of hacker slang later published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.

Why it mattered

It was a small bit of insider language that marked you as one of the people running the network, at a time when that was a few thousand academics and engineers. The joke worked because everyone using it lived under the actual threat of nuclear war, and the network itself had roots in military-funded research. It outlived the joke: the meta tag became one of the first ways to geotag a web page, so a Cold War gag ended up as working code.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Early network users took a dull admin field and turned it into a shared joke about being blown up, then put it on every post as proof they belonged. They also published their exact location to strangers without much worry, which few people would do casually now.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.