About PIPPO.COM

The origin of the name

I first met the word PIPPO in the early days of learning BASIC on a ZX-80, back in middle school.

In Italian programming culture, pippo has long been used as a placeholder name: the local equivalent of foo, bar, or foobar. A metasyntactic variable before most people knew they needed one.

So why use it for a domain?

Because it represents the very beginning of tinkering, coding and building: naming something temporary so that something real can start existing.

Fast forward to 1995

In 1995, I was working as a system administrator for one of the first Italian Internet Service Providers, after an intense training period in Israel at Xpert UNIX Systems: a company of real hackers, back when that word still carried its original and noble meaning of technical curiosity, ethical exploration and deep mastery.

At the time, registering a domain was not something everyone could easily do.

When I discovered that pippo.com was still available, I registered it immediately. The idea was to create a permanent home for everything I was learning, writing and sharing about the Internet, UNIX culture, open systems and frontier computing.

The pioneer years: the guide and personal publishing

From the beginning, PIPPO.COM became the digital home of the Guida a Internet e alla Realtà Virtuale — Guide to the Internet and Virtual Reality, an educational project I had been writing and continuously updating since 1992 to help demystify the digital revolution.

The goal was simple: to create a beacon on the Italian Web for geeks, hackers, sysadmins, students and technically curious people who wanted to understand what was happening beneath the surface of the new networked world.

In its early years, PIPPO.COM also evolved into one of the first personal publishing spaces in Italy, long before “blog” became a common word. It became an independent hub for discussions around Linux and open source software, digital freedom, Internet culture and cyber-rights, advanced networking and system administration, frontier computing and early online communities.

It was a meeting point for people who believed that understanding technology was not just a professional skill, but a civic duty.

Still here

Thirty years of stratified content. PIPPO.COM is an unstructured, imperfect, and living digital ecosystem—the exact opposite of the glossy, empty storefronts clogging the web today.

We've watched the dot-com bubble, SEO gurus, and generalist portals come and die. In all likelihood, we will bury this current historical phase too, where striking a pose takes priority over articulating a coherent thought.

Don't look for conversion funnels or a spit-shined personal brand, you won't find them. We are still here, waiting for humanity to heal, or for the servers to take over. Whichever comes first.

The evolution: welcome to the personal online OS

Recently, I redesigned PIPPO.COM as a small personal online operating system.

The idea is not just aesthetic nostalgia. It is a deliberate choice.

In a web increasingly optimized to make us scroll, react and consume whatever algorithms decide to place in front of us, PIPPO.COM asks the visitor to do something almost subversive: type, choose, explore, search.

This site is an invitation to make a small intellectual effort and become an active protagonist in the search for information, instead of passively receiving content.

Yes, the interface is unusual. That is the point.