The History of Nightwol

Nightwol was the internet alter ego of Steve Fagg of Harlow, England. Steve can be reached by email at:

The name was a deliberate misspelling of 'Nightowl' in honour of the spelling used by the character Owl in the Winnie the Pooh books by A.A. Milne. Steve first took the name Nightowl in the mid 1970s, inspired by the song of that name written by James Taylor as sung by Carly Simon on her "No Secrets" album. The change of spelling was instituted early in 1994 due to the existence of a prior claimant to the nick "Nightowl" on IRC. Steve always used to maintain that, regardless of spelling, the name should be pronounced 'nightOWL' rather than 'nightWOL' but was happy to answer to the latter pronunciation, which became the generally favoured form.

Steve has been on the internet (starting out in Usenet newsgroups) since 1985 and became a member of the Ecto mailing list shortly after its creation in 1991. Nightwol has a suite of rooms on the EctoMUSH and for the whole of 1994 was a major presence in the #Ecto IRC channel, where Steve first met his wife Lisa. One of his main claims to fame at that time was his willingness to send, completely free of charge, sampler tapes to interested people all over the world in an attempt to spread the word about the music of Happy Rhodes.

Steve remained a (sporadically contributing) member of the Ecto mailing list until 1998 and helped out with the compilation of some of the pages in the Ectophiles' Guide to Good Music (notably those for Abba, Julia Fordham, Frida, Peter Gabriel, Evelyn Glennie, Loreena McKennitt, Alison Moyet, Steeleye Span, and Yazoo). His comments, trawled from postings to the mailing list, show up in the entries for several artists in the guide.

As is told elsewhere, Steve and Lisa conducted much of their courtship in a private DALnet IRC channel and the time which this occupied led to a gradual reduction in Nightwol's presence in the public parts of IRC. By the time that Lisa finally moved permanently to England (in August, 1996), both of them had had quite enough of IRC to last a lifetime, so that phase of Nightwol's existence was over.

Nightwol's suite of rooms still exists on the EctoMUSH but the whole Ecto area of Tiny CWRU has been a ghost town for some years, so these pages now represent Nightwol's only active presence in cyberspace.

About the real Steve