Страница 102 из 155
Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”
The earliest virtual communities began with email chains that were distributed to large self-selected groups of subscribers. They became known as mailing lists. The first major list, in 1975, was SF-Lovers, for science fiction fans. The ARPA managers initially wanted to shut it down out of fear that some senator might not be amused by the use of military money to support a sci-fi virtual hangout, but the moderators of the group successfully argued that it was a valuable training exercise in juggling large information exchanges.
Soon other methods of forming online communities arose. Some used the backbone of the Internet; others were more jury-rigged. In February 1978 two members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, found themselves snowed in by a huge blizzard. They spent the time developing the first computer Bulletin Board System, which allowed hackers and hobbyists and self-appointed “sysops” (system operators) to set up their own online forums and offer files, pirated software, information, and message posting. Anyone who had a way to get online could join in. The following year, students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, which were not yet co
Even with these new bulletin boards and newsgroups, most average PC owners could not easily join virtual communities. Users needed a way to co
MODEMS
The little device that finally created a co
It was slow in coming because AT&T had a near-monopoly over the nation’s phone system, even controlling the equipment you could use in your home. You couldn’t co
Then came the Hush-A-Phone case. It involved a simple plastic mouthpiece that could be snapped onto a phone to amplify your voice while making it harder for those nearby to overhear you. It had been around for twenty years, causing no harm, but then an AT&T lawyer spotted one in a shopwindow, and the company decided to sue on the absurd ground that any external device, including a little plastic cone, could damage its network. It showed how far the company would go to protect its monopoly.
Fortunately, AT&T’s effort backfired. A federal appeals court dismissed the company’s claim, and the barriers to jacking into its network began to crumble. It was still illegal to co
The next step came when, a headstrong Texas cowboy won, after a twelve-year legal battle he financed by selling off his cattle, the right for his customers to use a radio-enabled extension phone he had invented. It took a few years for all of the regulations to be worked out, but by 1975 the Federal Communications Commission opened the way for consumers to attach electronic devices to the network.
The rules were stringent, due to AT&T lobbying, so electronic modems were initially expensive. But in 1981 the Hayes Smartmodem came on the market. It could be plugged directly into a phone line and co
THE WELL
In almost every decade of the Digital Revolution, the amused and amusing Stewart Brand found a way to stand at the locus where technology overlapped with community and the counterculture. He had produced the techno-psychedelic show at Ken Kesey’s Trips Festival, reported on Spacewar and Xerox PARC for Rolling Stone, aided and abetted Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and founded the Whole Earth Catalog. So in the fall of 1984, just as modems were becoming easily available and personal computers were becoming user-friendly, it was not surprising that Brand helped to conjure up the idea for the prototypic online community, The WELL.
It began when Brand was visited by another of the playfully earnest and creative denizens of the idealistic techno-counterculture, Larry Brilliant. A physician and epidemiologist, Brilliant had a compulsion to change the world and have fun while doing so. He had served as the doctor for an American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, sought enlightenment at a Himalayan ashram with the famed guru Neem Karoli Baba (where he first crossed paths with Steve Jobs), enlisted in the World Health Organization’s campaign to eliminate smallpox, and with support from Jobs and the counterculture luminaries Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy founded the Seva Foundation, which focused on curing blindness in poor communities around the world.
When one of the helicopters used by the Seva Foundation in Nepal had mechanical problems, Brilliant used a computer conferencing system and an Apple II that Jobs had donated to organize online a repair mission. The potential power of online discussion groups impressed him. When he went to teach at the University of Michigan, he helped to build a company around a computer conferencing system that had been created on the university’s network. Known as PicoSpan, it allowed users to post comments on different topics and strung them into threads for all to read. Brilliant’s idealism, techno-utopianism, and entrepreneurialism flowed together. He used the conferencing system to bring medical expertise to Asian hamlets and organize missions when something went wrong.
When Brilliant went to a conference in San Diego, he called his old friend Stewart Brand for lunch. They met at a beachside restaurant near where Brand pla