AGRIPPA (A Book of the Dead): The Poem Running in Emulation

William Gibson’s poem played from a 3½-inch diskette on a 1992-era Mac computer running the System 7 operating system. When the diskette ran, the text of the poem scrolled up the screen (accompanied by infrequent sound effects—a camera shutter click, a gun going off—while an encryption program on the diskette encoded each line and made the poem “disappear” after its first reading. On December 9, 2008--the sixteenth anniversary of the original “Transmission” event debuting Agrippa--The Agrippa Files was a