THE MEANING OF "K"
by Mini Appler

     I'm one of the original 4 Midwest Pirates Guild members.  MPG was one of
the first pirate groups, based around the Apple ][.  We started the K-craze in
1982.

     No, it didn't come from K as in Kilobytes.  The "K" concept originated
from our style of saying "Okay, bye" on the phone.  One late night in a
hurry to hack the latest ware before anyone else did, we hung up with a
"k-bye".  It just happened, without thinking.  It sounded cool.

     We hung out, ate pizza, cracked warez.  I believe Sinbad (one of the 4)
was the first to go "k-cool dude."  It sounded cool and from there, we all
went nuts.  For months it was K-this, K-that... we made ourselves sick.
Eventually we settled down to our original K-cool & K-bye.

     We had several BBSs.  The most popular and well known was the Safehouse.
It wasn't surprising how it spread.  We had over 10,000 users on our systems
combined and habitually wrote "kbye" and "k-cool" on our messages.  Heck, I
think we even put it on a few crack screen title pages.

Anyway, for what it's worth, that's how it started.