Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

> Dave Hughes

NAPLPS!
  

    
I spent some time with Colonel Hughes. He was a force of nature, for
sure! He had something to do with bringing wifi to Mt. Everest's
base camp. He was pretty active in all the community networking
conversations, along with people like the late Steve Cisler and my
pal Gene Crick. Many others trying to address the "digital divide."
The community networking movement probably deserves some chapters in
a sequel to _The Modem World_.
  

    
Kevin had technical and other issues that kept him away from the
conversation for several days. He's agreed to extend the
conversation for another week - so instead of the 11th, our formal
end date is extended to July 18. (And we can always keep going past
that date, if everybody's still engaged.)
  

    
Oh, good.

One thing the book (and this conversation) has me wondering is:

To what extent early pioneering projects are inevitably displaced by
the later, more highly organized efforts of what become the mature
players in any given field?

The pioneers show the way, they prove the initial viability of a given
activity, and this, in turn, attracts a more financially driven group
of participants who gradually reform the activity using well-established
patterns of commerce.

How much choice did we have then -- and how much choice do we have now?
  

    
I don't know about the BBS world, but in USENET it was the "September
that never ended."

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September>

tl;dr Access to USENET basically required an account at a university,
government agency, or high tech firm.  This was a sort of "self
selection" that weeded out most of the US population.  Every September
college students would get accounts, discover USENET, and flail around
and either "join" USENET or leave.  By "join" I mean learn the rules
and behave.

Around '93, ISPs discovered USENET and gave all users access.  Like
AOL, who basically just said "here's USENET" to its subscribers.
  

    

this has been fascinating. thanks, everyone.

my first foray into online communication was a little something called
SFNet. where you'd drop quarters into a repurposed old Ms Pac Man machine
and then log onto a chat board, get email, etc. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/02/17/a-cuppa-and-a-comp
uter/971b070e-c318-42f7-b74e-65d4561b93f0/

i hadn't found or read that article in a long time -- so funny! i'm the
person interviewed there who's calling herself Molly Mirbane (my SFNet
handle). in the original there was a great photo of me and a friend in a
Berkeley cafe, nerding out on the machine.

also fun to realize that i knew a like 3/4 of the people quoted in the
piece. 

great fun.

back then, democratizing this type of interaction seemed so essential! this
world of BBSs we've been discussing was so closed off to most people. if
you weren't technical by nature or by education... didn't have access to
the technology itself or to the knowledge... didn't speak the same way the
BBS (or ham radio) people spoke... didn't have the money (or relative
money/time to learn how to hack your way through)... it was just extremely
inaccessible. 

SNFet was like, here. put a quarter in this box. now you're online for
fifteen minutes. easy peasy.
  

    
Wayne Gregori ran SFNet.  I still have one of his SFNet coffee mugs.  The
really cool thing about SFNet was that it ran with the Community Memory idea
that Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin, and others started in 1973 by putting
terminals around in public places like the Berkeley Food CoOp and Leopold's
Records.

SFNet had nice table top furniture that provided the monitor and keyboard.
It was a multi-line community BBS that was coin operated.  I think there was
one in Muddy Waters coffee shop on Valencia.  I would regularly see homeless
folks in the cafe logging in to coordinate food and places to stay. It was a
brilliant resource.
  

    

there was definitely one in Muddy Waters on or near Valencia. i was one of
those homeless kids for a while, and i spent many an hour sitting in Muddy
Waters, writing, drawing comics, eating oat cakes (half a $2 oat cake =
breakfast), and scraping up quarters to get on SF Net. 

Wayne Gregori was very cool as i recall, meeting him online and off a few
times. 

i also used the one at Cafe Milano on Bancroft in Berkeley fairly often.
upstairs. that's where i very first logged into anything ever! i remember
it distinctly. i put in the quarters, gave myself a name, and started
chatting with dozens of people at once. each line limited to, what, maybe
140 characters. 

after about five minutes of this -- all very fun, with loads of laughs and
wit -- a bunch of people came piling up the cafe stairs, loudly. they got
right in my face. "Hey, who're you?" "What's your handle?" they were
real-life SFNet people. it was great.

one of those SFNet people, the hilariously named Nonookie Atall, later gave
me a modem and helped me set it up so i could log in from home. and that
meant i could do this thing i'd been curious about for a long time, as a
sometimes-reader of Whole Earth Review and Mondo 2000: log onto The Well.
  

    
T, the night I met you f2f the first time, Eric Hughes and Jude
Milhon were showing me how SFNet works when you walked in. I was
wishing we had something similar in Austin - eventually we did
something similar with wifi, when Austin Wireless City pushed the
concept of free wifi in public places.
  

    
Thanks for the excuse to post this arcane footnote about "Eternal
September", <jet>. A few years ago, I went hunting for early uses of
the phrase and came across this exchange on
alt.folklore.computers...

On January 25, 1994, the artist Dave Fischer (who some of you may
know?) mused about the end of newbie season: "September 1993 will go
down in net.history as the September that never ended."

He was replying to this sarcastic post from the day before: "the
"Imminent Death of the Net" [...] has echoed at least since the
first FidoNet gateway...(or was it Compu$erve?)" 

It's a nice illustration of how feelings of decline can take hold--
even when a community is flourishing. (Also, of the poor treatment
of BBS users.)

Linking to individual USENET posts is tricky but this should get you
to the thread:
<https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wF4CpYbWuuA/m/jS6ZOyJd10s
J>

Also, <pozar>, your work at IA is deeply, deeply appreciated! Making
those USENET archives available really lit a spark. For example, Ian
Milligan wrote a bit about using the UTZOO data to explore the
"Canadian USENET":
<https://ianmilli.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/exploring-the-usenet-archive-early-t
houghts/>
  

    
>to, what, maybe 140 characters.

Probably 132.  My memory is that they were using old TTY equipment,
but that's what people told me.  I never saw one in person.
  

    

>  T, the night I met you f2f the first time, Eric Hughes and Jude
>  Milhon 

wow! what fun. were we in SF or Sausalito or Berkeley? 

i miss Eric Hughes and St. Jude and Mondo 2000 and Fringe Ware. 
  

    
I finished The Modem World last night. I ate it up in two evenings.
Lots of fun and a bit of pain in having it remind me about some of
the history. This is the best book I have seen that captures that
history of 1200 baud characters slowly filling up a phosphorus green
screen.  The community, the technology, the politics and the decline.
Thank you Kevin for documenting it.
  

    
When I worked at UC San Francisco in 1986 and 1987 the campus was
connected to the Internet over one 9600 Baud modem line to UC
Berkeley. A few years later everything changed.
  

    
> were we in SF or Sausalito or Berkeley?

I think SF. I was there for the 1993 Conference on Computers,
Freedom, and Privacy, I think. I felt like I was in a whirlwind,
that trip. At CFP I interviewed <tomj> - here's a link to that
interview, where we went pretty deep and detailed about FidoNet:
<https://plutopia.io/tom-jennings-interview-1993/>
  

    
<88> that's a great review! Thanks, Tim.
  

    
OK! Now that we're into week 2, here's a question that I've been
wrestling with: do you consider The WELL a BBS? 
  

    
Thanks everyone so much for links to the background information,
it's really good stuff.
  

    
And it's interesting, reading this, to recall that I got on the Well
and then the Internet in very early Oct. of 1993, just as the first
wave of 'ordinary folks' were filtering onto the 'net as it was
(still all text unless you had a T1), the World Wide Web was just
being built.
  

    
I have described the WELL to other folks as a BBS - it's an easy
mental model to invoke. But whatever the WELL is, it is far more
substantial than any BBS I used back when I was using BBS's, and
since pretty early, we don't provide software for download
(excepting the occasional WELL-focused utility).
  

    
I don't think the well is a BBS if you use the description of BBSes in
Houston in the mid-to-late-80s.

The main difference is more than one person can use the system at the
same time and you can have "slippage" in discussions.  I know there
were many multi-line BBSes in some areas and I paid to use one in
Houston.  Those were more CB simulators than anything else.

I'm not a deadhead or a hippy and while I lived in the bay area, it
was in Mountain View.  In 1993 SF and MV were completely different
towns.

On the well I quickly found newsgroups similar to USENET groups I likd
and I could ignore the ones that bored me.

What was really different then was <genx>.  Maybe I would describe
<genx> in the 90s as a "bbs that's a part of a network of bbses".
  

    
Structurally, the WELL is definitely a BBS - a "system" with a
"bulletin board" structure of conversation - the idea of "posting"
some item, and other users posting responses.

Wikipedia has this definition: "A bulletin board system or BBS (also
called Computer Bulletin Board Service, CBBS) is a computer server
running software that allows users to connect to the system using a
terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions
such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news
and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through
public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting."
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system>

The WELL is a computer server, it runs software that allow users to
connect using a terminal program (or a web interface). We may not do
as much uploading and downloading, but it's still possible. Our
emphasis is on the "message board" which has evolved as a relatively
sophisticated framework for conversation.
  

    
I tend to agree that the historical distinction between a 'conferencing
system' and a 'bulletin board system' has largely faded away.

Given a focus here on 'alternative histories of the internet,' the 
historical differences may be the more interesting to us. It seems that 
the Well's current hierarchy of conferences, topics, and posts evolved 
some years before the Well was launched (in 1985). 

While the Well's underlying software, PicoSpan, was written in 1980, it
was an evolutionary successor to a system called CONFER (developed in 
1975), which I think aimed at going beyond the use of email for "group
decision making." 

   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoSpan>
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONFER_(software)>

Historically, I think the notion of a BBS had more informal roots.
More along the lines of 'Hey, let's talk' rather than 'We need to
sit down and solve this problem.'

How much does 'intention' matter in all this?
  

    
That Wikipedia issue talks about it being a conferencing tool, and
later has a reference to it being used on a BBS. So maybe the WELL
has been a BBS using a conferencing tool - BBS is platform,
conferencing tool is software for the platform.
  

    
(slip)
And we can trace the idea of a 'conference' back to it's physical
origins -- for example, Engelbart gave 'The Mother of All Demos' at
the ACM/IEEE Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968.

   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos>

Reportedly, the system that was demonstrated (NLS) was inspired in part
by Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" (published in 1945) in which

> Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts
> toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a
> desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of
> the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that
> it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped
> to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.

 --  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think>

The dream there was for a 'sort of collective memory' -- a knowledge
medium. Is 'knowledge' intrinstically 'social?' Was this a dream of
social media?