Twenty-one years ago today The Well opened for logins. In Internet time that was eons ago. The Well was one of the earliest bulletin boards in existence, and one of the best-known. It mostly hosted conversations by people in northern California. Orginally, “Well” stood for “Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link”, and for a long while it was run by the same folks who published the Whole Earth Review and Co-evolution Quarterly.
I spent a lot of years living and working in the alternative culture, and I read about the Well more than once. I wrote the dial-up number on a notebook and I carried it around for years. But I didn’t have a computer back then, and I didn’t live in California, so the early years of the Well passed me by.
When I finally did settle in with my own computer and a place to dial from, it was October of 1993. I logged into the Well, and I’ve never left. I didn’t like it at first. The Unix-driven environment was hard to understand, and like any long-standing community it had many in-groups and out-groups, its own mores and language and shared understandings that I didn’t share.
But it was also full of really smart, funny people, talking about dozens of interesting subjects, and brimming over with new things to learn. So by the time I’d been there a few months, I was hooked.
I learned how to use the message board software. I even learned a little Unix. I got to know the people, and eventually met some of them in the flesh. I started playing online in Muses, where I met the stranger who never seemed like a stranger who eventually became my husband. I made a few fast friends, and learned to cope with the people I disliked. I learned and learned and learned. And to this day I still do.
There’s never a day that goes by where the people of the Well fail to amuse me, teach me, or astound me with their brilliance. They also annoy me, shock me, and dismay me with stupidity. In every way they mirror the human condition, and they mirror myself, and I love them all intently, even the ones I really dislike.
The Well also led me to the Internet, via a gateway which made me promise, every time I used it, that I would never use the Internet for commercial purposes.
Yes, it’s true. I didn’t use the Internet to get to the Well. That wasn’t really possible for ordinary people back in the day. I dialed in long-distance, paying by the minute and paying the Well by the hour. And I have never made a lot of money, so you know it was important. Eventually I signed on via the Compuserve Packet Network, which charged me by the hour but cost much less than AT&T. And then came netcom and my first flat-rate dial-up ‘net access.
Boy, these years have gone by fast. I loved using gopher to rummage around the Smithsonian databases. I never quite figured out WAIS searches. Everything back then was text-based, and the web pages we visited were all in ASCii, rendered by lynx. But the first time a Well friend invited us over to his T1-connected computer at NOAA and showed us video from a space shuttle streaming from out of nowhere, the World Wide Web had me hooked. I used the Well to get to the Internet, and it led me to an even wider virtual world.
Today most people think that the web is all there is, and the Well is home to only a few thousand dedicated talkers. It remains one of the few for-pay message board systems in existence. The software (called picospan) runs rings around anything you’ve seen in web forums or commenting systems. We also have a web interface now, and I use that a lot but the web seems sluggish in comparison. The people are still smart and funny and irritating as ever. Still mostly from California too, though we have a lot of members around the U.S., and even a few from the rest of the world.
I’ve seen the Well go through a couple of different owners since I joined. Currently we’re a subset of Salon, and they’re trying to sell us off, so the future is uncertain. But then, the future usually is uncertain.
This afternoon, when I was with a couple friends toasting the Well’s 21st birthday, we asked ourselves if there was any chance it could last another 21 years. Who knows? People have been predicting the imminent demise of the Well nearly forever, and we’re still here, so maybe there’s a chance. I hope so. The Well is a small treasure of the ‘net, and in its own way it is irreplaceable. At least, I’ve never found anyplace I liked so well, and I’ve seen a lot of communities in my life, online and off.