Community Memory
Encyclopedia
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud
Baud
In telecommunications and electronics, baud is synonymous to symbols per second or pulses per second. It is the unit of symbol rate, also known as baud rate or modulation rate; the number of distinct symbol changes made to the transmission medium per second in a digitally modulated signal or a...
link to a teleprinter
Teleprinter
A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages. Individuals could place messages in the computer and then look through the memory for a specific notice.
While initially conceived as an information and resource sharing network linking a variety of counter-cultural economic, educational, and social organizations with each other and the public, Community Memory was soon generalized to be an information flea market, by providing unmediated, two-way access to message databases through public computer terminals. Once the system became available, the users demonstrated that it was a general communications medium that could be used for art, literature, journalism, commerce, and social chatter.
People
Community Memory was created by Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee FelsensteinLee Felsenstein
Lee Felsenstein is an American computer engineer who played a central role in the development of the personal computer...
, acting as The Community Memory Project within the Resource One computer center at Project One in San Francisco. This group of computer savvy friends and partners wanted to create a simple system that could function as a source of community information. Felsenstein took care of hardware
Hardware
Hardware is a general term for equipment such as keys, locks, hinges, latches, handles, wire, chains, plumbing supplies, tools, utensils, cutlery and machine parts. Household hardware is typically sold in hardware stores....
, Lipkin software, and Szpakowski user interface and information husbandry. Community Memory (CM) in its first phase (1973- 1975) was an experiment to see how people would react to using a computer to exchange information. At that time few people had any direct contact with computers. CM was conceived as a tool to help strengthen the Berkeley community. Their brochure states that "strong, free, non-hierarchical channels of communication--whether by computer and modem, pen and ink, telephone, or face-to-face--are the front line of reclaiming and revitalizing our communities.".
The creators and founders of Community Memory shared the values of northern California counter-culture of the 1960s, which included the celebration of free speech and the anti-war movement. They were also supporters of ecological, low cost, decentralized, and user-friendly technology.
CM had a presence in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
starting in July, 1974, led by Andrew Clement. A second incarnation of Community Memory, aimed at creating a global information network, appeared in the later seventies. Its major players were Efrem Lipkin and Ken Colstad.
In his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Anchor Press/Doubleday...
, Steven Levy
Steven Levy
Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy.-Career:...
described how the founders of Community Memory began the organization. Some of the founders were involved in the Homebrew Computer Club
Homebrew Computer Club
The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist users' group in Silicon Valley, which met from March 5, 1975 to December 1986...
, an organization credited with significant impact in the development of the personal computer.
History
The first terminal was an TeletypeTeletype Corporation
The Teletype Corporation, a part of American Telephone and Telegraph Company's Western Electric manufacturing arm since 1930, came into being in 1928 when the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Company changed its name to the name of its trademark equipment...
Model 33 ASR connected to the SDS 940 computer by telephone, using a 10 character per second acoustic coupled modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
. It was located at the top of the stairs leading to Leopold's Records in Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, right next to a busy conventional bulletin board
Bulletin board
A bulletin board is a surface intended for the posting of public messages, for example, to advertise things to buy or sell, announce events, or provide information...
. The Teletype machine was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so what was being printed out could be seen, and with holes for one's hands while typing. This was the first time individuals who were not studying a scientific subject had the opportunity to be able to use a computer.
Brief instructions were mounted above the modified keyboard showing how to send a message to the mainframe, how to attach keywords
Keyword (Internet search)
An index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval, is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the...
to it to make it searchable and how to search those keywords to find messages from others. To use a Community Memory terminal, the user would type the command ADD, followed by the text of the item, and then by any keywords under which he/she desired the item to be indexed. To search for an item, the user would type the command FIND followed by a logical structure of keywords connected with AND's, OR's and NOT's. By the side sat a CM assistant, attracting people's attention and encouraging them to add and find messages. In its approach, Community Memory adopted a creative method to funding the project. They provided users with coin-operated terminals which could be read without charge; however, in order to post an opinion, users were required to pay twenty-five cents or one dollar to start a new forum.
The record store and its bulletin board brought together drummers seeking fusion guitarists, bagel aficionados looking for sources, and the first poets of the medium, notably one who went by the nom de plume of Benway - the first net personality. Periodically directories of recently added items or of musician-related messages would be printed out and left there. In other terminal locations, users sought out complete strangers to assemble car pools, organize study groups, find chess partners, or even pass tips on good restaurants. According to Colstad and Lipkin, the rate of use of the system was fairly high and constant in relation to the environment of the terminals. About fifty searches and ten additions occurred each day at each location. Given the length of individual sessions with the system this was at least one-third the maximum capacity of a terminal.
Anonymity was possible with Community Memory because users were not required to share their names or register to use the system. All of the information on the system is community generated, which has two implications. Firstly, there was no central authority of any kind that establishes what information is available in the system. The second implication is that information is not imported from other sites.
When CRT
Cathode ray tube
The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...
based terminals became more cheaply available one was set up at the original Berkeley Whole Earth Access
Whole Earth Access
The Whole Earth Access was a countercultural retail store in Berkeley, California. Two more shops were later opened San Rafael and San Francisco . By 1993 it also had stores in Concord, San Mateo and Sacramento...
Store and another at the Mission Public Library in San Francisco. The character of the message base varied with location.
The Community Memory software was implemented as an extension of the ROGIRS keyword information retrieval system written by Bart Berger and John M. Cooney at Resource One, which in turn was derived from Robert Shapiro's MIRS (Meta Information Retrieval System). It was written in QSPL and ran on an SDS 940, an early timesharing
Time-sharing
Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...
system the size of eight refrigerators, originally used by Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
in The Mother of All Demos
The Mother of All Demos
The Mother of All Demos is a name given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace...
, which had been donated to Resource One for community use.
By 1974 it was apparent that Community Memory needed to move from its home on the XDS-940 (which was large, underpowered, and uneconomical) and be recast as a network of more modern minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
s. It was shut down in January 1975; its staff left Resource One and began to explore funding for a new project which would develop the software for a replicable and networked version of Community Memory.
See also
- What the Dormouse SaidWhat the Dormouse SaidWhat the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the Collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community to...
- history of the XDS-940 and Resource One - Community informaticsCommunity informaticsCommunity informatics , also known as community networking, electronic community networking, community-based technologies or community technology refers to an emerging field of investigation and practice concerned with principles and norms related to information and communication technology with...
- Hacker EthicHacker ethicHacker ethic is the generic phrase which describes the moral values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community. The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s...
External links
- Community Memory history and images
- Community Memory: A Public Information Network ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society article by Ken Colstad and Efrem Lipkin
- Implications of Community Memory ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society article by Michael Rossman
- Evelyn Pine Former Director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
- Remembering Community Memory 2001 story at SF Gate
- Hackers and hippies: The origins of social networking 2011 BBC article featuring Community Memory as part of the history of social networking
- Rosenzweig, Roy. “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet” from The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 5, (Dec., 1998), pp. 1530-1552