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Robert Adrian X (Vienna).[45] The resultant series of collaborative authoring projects was conducted during the next few years over the time-sharing network of I. P. Sharp Associates. Inspired and supported by Robert Adrian X, in 1980 the Vienna office of I. P. Sharp developed a simple «intercontinental, interactive, electronic art-exchange program designed for artists and anybody else interested in alternative possibilities of using new technologies.» ARTEX (Artist's Electronic Exchange Network), as the software was called, was «deliberately kept simple so that even inexperienced and non-specialized participants could work with it and costs were minimized.»[46] The electronic mailbox network ARTEX existed from 1980 to 1991, and was used by some thirty-five artists worldwide.[47] In that period, the Internet itself (as well as, respectively, the Arpanet and the Usenet) was still almost exclusively the preserve of academics.[48] Local BBS mailbox systems into which users could dial at local call rates first began to proliferate in the early 1980s. The ARTEX network therefore amounted to a veritable revolution, and international telecommunications events organized
in the course of the 1980s by «ARTEX Community» members seemed to foreshadow developments in the next decade.
Alongside Robert Adrian X' «The World in 24 Hours» (1982), the first art-related networked authoring processes were attempted in Roy Ascott's «La plissure du texte» (1983), Norman White's «Hearsay» (1984), the collaborative Minitel writing project staged for the exhibition «Les Immatériaux» (1985), John Cage's «The First Meeting of the Satie Society» (1986), the «Planetary Network» devised by Roy Ascott and shown at the Venice Biennial (1986), or the hypertext project «PooL Processing» (from 1988 onward) of Heiko Idensen and Matthias Krohn in Germany. Roy Ascott[49] carried out his collaborative writing project «La plissure du texte» in 1983 on the occasion of the «Electra 1983» exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville Paris. Organized by Frank Popper, the show was a survey of the usage of electricity in art. For «La plissure du texte,» artists in eleven cities in Australia, North America and Europe jointly wrote a fairytale on different narrative planes.[50] The title was an allusion