Toasted Mojo: Who is Rainman?

December 29, 2010

Who is Rainman?

Rain Man is a 1988 comedy-drama film written by Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass and directed by Barry Levinson. It tells the story of an abrasive and selfish yuppie, Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise), who discovers that his estranged father has died and bequeathed all of his multimillion-dollar estate to his other son, Raymond, a man with autism of whose existence Charlie was unaware.[1]

Both Jay-Z & Eminem have said they are "Rainman".

Rainman, which stands for Remote Automated Information Manager, is the proprietary publishing platform of AOL (formerly America Online). It was conceptualized and coding started by Marc Seriff and completed by Craig Dykstra, both AOL founders. Rainman code is used to create forums and pages on the AOL service by AOL and content partners of the company.

AOL has recently begun using the universal HTML code to publish content and information to its service, moving away from its own publishing language, and migrating numerous forums to web-based content.

Rainman commands and access are kept strictly confidential by AOL, which provides training and usage rights only to company and partner staff. However, Rainman commands have been extensively documented on the Internet, although AOL accounts without Rainman rights are unable to publish modifications/pages/keywords to the system. Many AOL security issues have historically been the result of hackers gaining access to Rainman software, with and without elevated accounts; this has become less of an issue since AOL's late-1990s introduction of SecurID protection for Rainman-enabled accounts.

Over the years Rainman added a lot of enhancements and additional functionality such as HTML and mixed content publishing support, conditional content display based on variety of criteria (for instance, time), tracking and metrics, open interfaces, and many others. Last major releases of Rainman were in 2006/2007 to support UNPT AOL Welcome Screen publishing.

Some AOL volunteers formerly engaged in Rainman editing. This access was widely [but not universally] terminated due to Department of Labor guidelines which prevent volunteers of for-profit companies from performing duties substantially similar to those of paid employees.[2]