Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

A contemporaneous account of early goings-on:

http://www.jaedworks.com/shoebox/well/backroom.html
  

    
Oh man, that's <jdevoto>. I really miss her.
  

    
She is a rare, and missed, breath of fresh air.  I miss her, too.
  

    
I thought the stuff she's writing about there happened in 1992 or 1993, not
1991.
  

    

I think it is an <rbr> narrative, dated early in the emergence of the
Well.  I think Jean archived it.
  

    
Reading all this does bring back some memories ...

In just a few days (April 8) I'll be marking my 17th anniversary
here, having arrived in 1988.

I seem to have been one of the few relatively early members to 
arrive de novo.   I liked the Dead (first time I saw 'em live
was New Years Eve 66/67 at the Fillmore), but I was never a 
Deadhead.   I was a techie, but didn't arrive here via some
tech contact, in spite of living on the fringes of the Bay
Area (Santa Cruz).   I had bought the first Whole Earth 
catalog when it came out, and I'd read Coevolution Quarterly
on occasion, but I wasn't hooked on it.

I was at Autodesk from the very start.   By 1986 we were in 
a building in Sausalito, but developers like myself often 
worked from home.   We wanted a central repository for code
and messages that farflung coders could dial into.   Before
we put up our own we used the Well for a short while.   I
retired from Autodesk in 1987 to my rural home in the hills
above Santa Cruz.   Like a lot of folks I had a CompuServe
account, but ....   So I dug out the old Well dialup number
(415-332-6106) and connected.   I signed up.  I stayed.

I hear that the Well's performance during the Loma Prieta
earthquake was spectacular.   Living just 15 miles from 
the epicenter I was a bit busy.  We had no power for eight
days.  Our spring stopped producing water for two days.
We had four horses, a full size pig, two dogs, four cats
and two kids to take care of.   The house was filled with
broken glass and rotting food.   Everything we owned was
on the floor - much of it broken.   Luckily we were on 
stable ground and the house itself suffered no real harm.
The spring resumed production and eventually the power
came back up.   We survived.

For me one of the Well's finest times was the aftermath
of the 2000 election.  I'm a political junkie and cohost
the Politics conference here on the Well.   The election
2000 topics - linked among Politics, News, and Current - 
filled up in a matter of hours at first, then in days.
In essence we had thousands of correspondents on the 
scene in every hotspot.  We had people scanning and 
analyzing the domestic and foreign press and bringing
it back to us.   The sharpest minds you could ever
want to meet sucked up this info and produced some 
brilliant analysis.   No one did this because they 
had to - it was a labor of love - but we were on top
of the situation in a way that no one else in the 
country could be.   Those topics are permanently 
archived.
  

    
Not an rbr narrative, no--he wrote the epigraph.
  

    


Wait!  Jeanne was the Board member?  She was the "I" in all that?
  

    
Yes.
  

    
Today's the day.  Hipy Papy, WELL.
  

    
20 years ago today.....

I was a snotnosed kid in Galena, Mo with a book-learning-only idea of
what a MODEM was.

Where were you?

Happy Birthday Well.
  

    
Happy Billing Day! We were sure glad to be able to start charging!!!
Hoo-boy! The only thing was, the great majority of customers put it on
their credit card, and we couldn't find any tractor-feed credit card
forms. So we'd get a huge stack of the single carbon-copy charge slips
like you used to see in the local retailers, and we'd have to feed them
one-by-one through our dot-matrix printer. The more members, the
longer the monthly billing process. I started bringing them home and
paying my kids to feed them through - one kid on the keyboard of the
Compaq, the other slipping the form into the printer and restacking it.

Eventually, we did find the tractor-feed forms, which saved a lot of
time as long as there was no printer jam. Then it would turn back into
a nightmare. I'd show up at Wells Fargo with my huge pile of printed
vouchers and dump them on the counter. Most of the charges were for the
flat monthly 8 bucks - a fact of WELL life that kept us afloat through
all those years. The idle users. Thank youze!!!!

And even more eventually - when we reached the humongous threshold of
$30,000 billing per month - we could go digital and simply submit our
billings through, of all things, a modem.

Jeanne DeVoto, bless her heart, took on the onerous role of host/user
representative on the Board just after Bruce Katz began attending board
meetings in 1991. Here first exposure, therefore, was to Bruce taking
over the meeting as the only one there with any money, and his grand
plan to have the WELL become what amounted to a competitor to AOL.

That was one long eye-rolling meeting and Jeanne excused herself from
the board soon after. Then Tex quit, and four months after that, around
this time in 1992, I announced my plans to quit.
  

    
Hey everyone...long time no see...

I first came to the Well real early, sometime in the mid-80s, when I
was living in Berkeley. I was a long-time CQ reader (I _still_ won't
call it by that new name), so I probably read about it there. I didn't
stay very long (though last time I looked, at least one of my first
postings was still there, in some or another software conference); it
was too damned slow to justify keeping the phone tied up; besides that,
I'd started my own BBS, a FidoNet node, and dedicated my online time
to that. 

After I decided to give up on the BBS (and after it gave up on me), I
caught up with the Well again sometime in the late 80s. Probably 1988
or so. The Well became a major part of my life. I probably averaged six
hours a day, maybe eight, multi-tasking with whatever else I was
doing. Hal's recollection of the 2000 election season coincides with
mine -- it was the peak experience of my tenure as a conference host. 

The Well was the fount of many of the most important things in my
life. It kept me going through years of clinical depression (that was
the source of my hermit-like behaviour); even though I wasn't
physically isolated like some other people, it was really my only
social outlet. It was the Well that got me (and several of my friends) 
connected with eBay, which turned out rather nice for us. It was on
the Well where I discovered an important truism: just because someone
annoys me, it doesn't mean their advice is bad (thank you <sofia>, and
I wish I'd listened.) It was on the Well that I learned another
important truism: when all your friends tell you to get a lawyer, you
should probably get a lawyer (thanks, and you know who you are.) 

And most important was the reason I left the Well. My beloved and I
found each other through the Well, and once we had found each other, we
had neither the reason nor the desire to spend all of our waking hours
here; we had each other to talk to, and anything we might have said on
the Well, we say to one another. The last time I was on the Well, I'm
pretty sure, was the day after she and I got engaged; we checked in
from midtown Manhattan on 9/11/2001. 

There are times I miss the Well. Sometimes, when I have an odd
question about something or another, I particularly feel it. I've been
reluctant to return, because it's such an interesting time suck (and,
frankly, I don't miss the negative small-town aspects one bit.) But the
Well was a vital part of my life for a decade and a half, and I'll be
ever grateful that such a community existed when I needed it so well.
  

    

Josh!  Good to see you.

Although I am allowed in the oldtimers.pri conference, I joined in
late 1994, and I never am really going to feel like an old timer.  

>For me one of the Well's finest times was the aftermath
of the 2000 election.

And then there was 9/11, and the following war on Afganistan, when the
<attack.> conference was created, and we had a genuine been-there,
done-that war reporter, <dkline>, to tell us far more and from a very
personal perspective about who was who and who'd done what to whom
when.

There is no other place on Earth, that I know of, that you could learn
about Afganistan and its travails in such a way.  
  

    
Fig, you and tex quit because Bruce's plan was too commercial and too
grandiose?
  

    

Great to see you, <josh>
  

    
I can't speak entirely for Tex, but I quit because I was tuckered out
and the Board refused to allow me to raise our rates enough to cover
our expenses. I wanted to hire a technical manager, but we couldn't
afford it. It turned out that by talking Mo into taking over my job,
the WELL could (1) get a technically sophisticated Director with good
WELL user DNA and (2) blackmail the Board into allowing the new
Director to raise the rates. The Board couldn't find anyone with
anything like Mo's qualifications. The WELL would not have accepted a
complete stranger as its new Director - there was a LOT of ferment at
that time. There were meetings happening...the natives were restless.
  

    
As part of my current work, I'm tracking an email list about
permaculture. One of the threads is about rock dust. 

Remember <untitled>?
  

    

Josh!  I can't begin to tell you how much I miss you around here.
  

    

> And with Mr. Gans' appearance and mentions of MaryE, I'm reminded of how
> our relationship with the GD community formed and staggered along.  Bennett
> Falk was the nerdy one, David "maddog" Gans was the musical one and Mary
> (Computer Currents) Eisenhart was the writing one.

Dude, that's Mary (MicroTimes) Eisenhart!


> But we apparently didn't have our "bona fides" together in their eyes and
> for a couple years at least we were reminded that the GD people could just
> up and leave us if we crossed them.

I don't remember it that way, but I was decidedly more cantankerous in those
days than I am now (and I owe a hell of a lot of my character growth to ex-
periences and friendships here in the WELL).

We did come here looking to test out ideas before investing in our own BBS.
Mary and Bennett knew a good deal more about this stuff than I did, but they
were turning me on to their knowledge - and one night in the balcony of the
Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium, we all got hit by the same bolt of Edisonian
lightning; we arrived separately at a party after the show with a big idea to
share with the others. We knew this was a community that existed within other
than geographical boundaries, and this technology was a perfect way for us to
meet and confer.

Mary knew about the WELL and the offer of free accounts to people with inter-
esting ideas. She had an account there already, and I think Bennett did, too;
I signed on in December of 1985, and we opened the gd conference on March 1,
1986. We passed out flyers in Provo Park when the Dead played the BCT in
April, and that brought in a lot of wonderful people, including <danlevy>,
still one my favorite humans and now the host of the dylan conference.

The gd conference took off like a shot, and we never left. People bought com-
puters and modems and learned how to use them just so they could be here.  I
melted into the greater community here (the mind conference was the most
amazingly funny hangout I could ever have imagined) and, somewhat to Mary's
frustration, lost all interest in creating a separate online world.

Ah, the mind conference. I remember sitting at a desk in our apartment on
Buena Vista West, socked in with fog as the wind howled, roaring with
laughter while nana, mandel, hlr, bulbhead, and others were all posting at
once in a topic called "laundromania." That was just as hard to explain as
"bang fortune minus O" to the hapless SO, but much, much more compelling to
me.
  

    
Josh!  hooray.  So great to see you back! The hosting of the 2000 election 
results marathon was such a high point here, despite the ultimate 
results.  What a ride that was.

Cliff, the idea of credit card billing before anybody had online 
credit card processing and settlement services is mind-boggling.  Just 
astonishing.
  

    
I joined the WELL 15 years ago.  

My original purpose was to try and find an old friend with whom I’d
lost touch.  The friend was Tom <mandel> Mandel.  Tom and I became
friends in Hawaii in the early 70s.  Tom was just back from a hitch
with Marines in Vietnam and I was a graduate student, antiwar activist
at the University of Hawaii.  We got along just fine.

Sometime in the late 80s--when Tom was working for SRI down on the
Peninsula--we lost connection for a year or so, but I remembered that
he had said something about some sort of “computer” thing called the
WELL.  Being a computer illiterate at the time, I made a few trips to
the WELL’s Gate 5 Road office for some face-to-face instruction.

Once I figured out how to make everything work, it didn’t take long to
find Tom. Wow, was I surprised by the difference between his on-line
persona and the man I thought I knew.  

Sadly, Tom is no longer with us.  I remember Howard’s wonderful
eulogy, delivered at a chapel somewhere in the hills above Palo Alto.

In 1991, Uncle Sam in the form of the National Health Service Corps
shipped me out to Rockford IL to provide services for the medically
indigent population of Winnebago County.  During that time of exile
from the Bay Area the WELL was a real lifeline to home and friends. 
Rockford is the childhood home of Stewart Brand.  Stewart read some of
my dispatches from Rockford that were posted in the Berkeley Conference
and wrote to tell me that they captured the spirit of Midwestern
“claustrophobia.”

The next year, while home from Rockford on vacation, I participated in
my first WELL-inspired singthing at the home of <reva> and <jcs>.  The
singthings continue to this day and they remain one of the joys of my
WELL experience.

After I got back to Northern California I was approached by <tex> to
host a health and medicine group for SFGate. That eventually evolved
into an occasional online column “Doctor E’s Diary”.  <doctore> BTW, is
not meant to sound Latin.  I took the name from what one of my nurses
called me, “Doctor E”.  She had trouble saying “Eshleman”.

Fast forward to 1998.  My medical group was getting into the WWW in a
big way and looking for a physician with on-line experience.  That was
me.  

Today I divide my professional time between seeing patients and being
the Chief Medical Editor of Kaiser’s members’ Web site.

I owe much to the WELL. I hope to see many of you at the party.
  

    
Remind me about <untitled>
  

    
Wow, Cliff, you took a bullet for the WELL.
  

    
I don't look at it that way, Paul. It was time for me to move on for a
bunch of reasons.

Microtimes/Computer Currents....eh, like I say, I'm a bit addled
though I still have old issues of Microtimes stashed somewhere, with
articles about the WELL turning yellow inside them.

<untitled> was a manic young man who insisted on posting paraphrases
of Bucky Fuller in poetic format. He had an agenda and a belief that
through the global application of rock dust, we could slow the
degradation of the environment and prevent the melting of glaciers.

He was not conversational and would post his non sequiturs in the most
inappropriate places, eventually leading to demands that we boot him.
We didn't like to boot people, so we gave him his own conference where
he could channel his considerable energy. He was the WELL bane du jour
during a certain time. 

I'd love to know who he was and what became of him.