###Or, how we hacked reality

This is an eight-pin AGOX connector:

In September of 2008, I was a student at the North Avenue Trade School and heavily involved in the WREK radio station. One of my good friends at the time was Robert Wright. My “initials” (how we logged in, signed up for shifts, etc.) at the radio station were “AGOX”, and I signed all my emails that way. One afternoon, Robert pointed me toward the Wikipedia Talk page for USB: specifically at a section called Mystery Micro Plug. At the bottom, he wrote:

Based on personal knowledge, and having worked in the field for a few years, the ‘Mystery Plug’ is internally named the ‘Agox connector’ when used in combination with digital cameras. We refer to them this way because of the gentleman with whom I worked. 128.61.120.190 (talk) 22:49, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I thought it was funny, so I replied.

I think I remember seeing it called the ‘Agox Connector’ in Nikon documentation somewhere. I always wondered why. 128.61.69.123 (talk) 22:56, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

It would have died at this point if another Wikipedia editor hadn’t gotten involved.

Hmmm… very interesting. Do you have a reference for it anywhere??? ǝɹʎℲxoɯ (contrib) 06:33, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Well… One good lie begets another. Rob said:

I’m no longer working there, but I could possibly try to get some documents from people who still work there. 128.61.120.190 (talk) 09:32, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

And then, a few days later, he said:

So, after having asked around, I’ve learned that the connector’s internal name of ‘Agox’ is on some documentation that we haven’t released to the public yet. The name is perfectly fine to use for the article, but the Nikon documents cannot be released. If I could cite them here, I would, but alas, I am still bound not to release the information behind this. 24.98.65.137 (talk) 04:48, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Finally, about a month later, I came up with the most ridiculous thing I could imagine.

It stands for Asynchronous Gamma-Object Transfer (x=trans). In Nikon’s logical model, the alpha object acts as a server, the beta object acts as a client, and data that flows between the two are considered gamma objects. There are delta and epsilon objects as well, but those are too small to get into. 128.61.69.123 (talk) 23:27, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

We left it at that. A few months later, Rob pointed me back at the main USB article. I scrolled through and saw this:

We’d done it! Someone took our lies and made them reality! It didn’t stop there. You could find Chinese companies selling AGOX cables and AGOX connectors, people mentioned AGOX connectors on forums, one guy even wrote a blog post about an AGOX to regular USB converter he made.

All good things must come to an end, and, rightly so, AGOX Connector got edited away. Wikipedia currently calls it a “UC-E6 proprietary (non-USB) plug”, but, in my heart of hearts, I know what it really is.