The distinctive logo shown to the left was the system's original ASCII art banner, appearing on the text-only service's dial-up login page.

[7] MindVox functioned both as a private BBS service, containing its own dedicated discussion groups, termed "conferences" — though usually referred to as "forums" by users — as well as a provider of internet and Usenet access.

[12] MindVox also attracted (sometimes with the aid of free accounts[13]) artists, writers and activists, including Billy Idol, Wil Wheaton, Robert Altman, Douglas Rushkoff, John Perry Barlow, and Kurt Cobain.

[17] Voices provided a compelling and sweeping first-person overview of the cultural forces that were at play in the hacker underground during the decade that pre-dated MindVox, considered by some the "Golden Age" of cyberspace.

More than a decade later, Voices remains one of the most read and widely distributed pieces of writing to ever emerge about the origins and possible futures of cyberspace.

[1] Voices also helped turn MindVox from being just another ISP into a counter-cultural media darling meriting full-length features in magazines and newspapers such as Rolling Stone, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Going to Rotten's search page,[28] and triple-clicking on the whitespace located between the Contact section and the gray bar at the bottom, reveals an inscrutable ibogaine rant.

Many different reasons have been given for the downfall, including increased competition from the arrival of large-scale providers like AT&T, possible legal difficulties, and the apparent incestuousness of the company and its core users.

[3] But none of the theories provided realistic answers as to why the final days of MindVox seem to be closer to The Great Gatsby,[38] and Altered States,[39] than a successful or unsuccessful technology corporation.

[40] A 1999 article by Tom Higgins (username "Tomwhore" on the system), a user and one time employee of MindVox, summarized the turbulent closing thus: By 1997 Patrick Kroupa had effectively disappeared from public view.

The major discrepancy between the Times and Wired dates lends additional credence to the idea that MindVox continued, at least for a while, to support a community after its modem lines were turned off.

[49] The "Agrippa" discussed by Kirschenbaum was an unusual cyberpunk-influenced media project from 1992 by the science-fiction author William Gibson; its first public "leak" was to MindVox users in December of that year.

In discussing the service, Kirschenbaum referred to MindVox as "a kind of interface between what Alan Sondheim has aptly called the darknet and the clean, well lighted cyberspaces".

While the labyrinth of conferences, files and user interactions providing a unique overview of the birth of the public internet that are buried within the depths of MindVox have never re-surfaced or been made publicly available, limited archives of some parts of the service remain online at: An IRC channel, EFnet #mindvox, created in the 1990s, has survived as a gathering place for some members of the older community.