Hospitable
Some good news: in 1971 I joined with Resource One, Inc., a nonprofit corporation having the purpose of bringing computer power to the counterculture, led by Pamela Hardt English. In an inspired piece of hustling they had talked the San Francisco business establishment, which was then feeling nervous about this counterculture thing, out of a slightly-used mainframe computer and enough money to get started (the story is told in my book).
The project I brought to Resource One – “Community Memory” – placed terminals in public spots where anyone could make use of an “electronic bulletin board”, as we put it. The software, built under Efrem Lipkin’s direction by a crew largely of draft refusers, placed control of the indexing in the users’ hands rather than in those of an “expert”, and people (many apparently in the counterculture) took to it naturally – this in 1973. It ran in three different forms (with gaps) until 1992.
Around 1990, when the term “Cyberspace” was coined by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, I realized what we had done in creating the first publicly-accessible social media system, as this image explains. That’s a shot of our very first terminal (an ASR33 teleprinter shrouded in a cardboard box to muffle the racket) in the corner.
