The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 102

Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”

The earliest virtual communities began with email chains that were distributed to large self-selected groups of subscribers. They became known as mailing lists. The first major list, in 1975, was SF-Lovers, for science fiction fans. The ARPA managers initially wanted to shut it down out of fear that some senator might not be amused by the use of military money to support a sci-fi virtual hangout, but the moderators of the group successfully argued that it was a valuable training exercise in juggling large information exchanges.

Soon other methods of forming online communities arose. Some used the backbone of the Internet; others were more jury-rigged. In February 1978 two members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, found themselves snowed in by a huge blizzard. They spent the time developing the first computer Bulletin Board System, which allowed hackers and hobbyists and self-appointed “sysops” (system operators) to set up their own online forums and offer files, pirated software, information, and message posting. Anyone who had a way to get online could join in. The following year, students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, which were not yet connected to the Internet, developed another system, hosted on personal computers, which featured threaded message-and-reply discussion forums. It became known as “Usenet,” and the categories of postings on it were called “newsgroups.” By 1984 there were close to a thousand Usenet terminals at colleges and institutes around the country.

Even with these new bulletin boards and newsgroups, most average PC owners could not easily join virtual communities. Users needed a way to connect, which wasn’t easy from home or even most offices. But then, in the early 1980s, an innovation came along, part technological and part legal, that seemed small but had a huge impact.

MODEMS

The little device that finally created a connection between home computers and global networks was called a modem. It could modulate and demodulate (hence the name) an analog signal, like that carried by a telephone circuit, in order to transmit and receive digital information. It thus allowed ordinary people to connect their computers to others online by using phone lines. The online revolution could now begin.

It was slow in coming because AT&T had a near-monopoly over the nation’s phone system, even controlling the equipment you could use in your home. You couldn’t connect anything to your phone line, or even to your phone, unless Ma Bell leased it to you or approved it. Although AT&T offered some modems in the 1950s, they were clunky and costly and designed mainly for industrial or military use, rather than being conducive to homebrew hobbyists creating virtual communities.

Then came the Hush-A-Phone case. It involved a simple plastic mouthpiece that could be snapped onto a phone to amplify your voice while making it harder for those nearby to overhear you. It had been around for twenty years, causing no harm, but then an AT&T lawyer spotted one in a shopwindow, and the company decided to sue on the absurd ground that any external device, including a little plastic cone, could damage its network. It showed how far the company would go to protect its monopoly.

Fortunately, AT&T’s effort backfired. A federal appeals court dismissed the company’s claim, and the barriers to jacking into its network began to crumble. It was still illegal to connect a modem into the phone system electronically, but you could do so mechanically, such as by taking your phone’s handset and cradling it into the suction cups of an acoustical coupler. By the early 1970s there were a few modems of this type, including the Pennywhistle, designed for the hobbyist crowd by Lee Felsenstein, that could send and receive digital signals at three hundred bits per second.^I

The next step came when, a headstrong Texas cowboy won, after a twelve-year legal battle he financed by selling off his cattle, the right for his customers to use a radio-enabled extension phone he had invented. It took a few years for all of the regulations to be worked out, but by 1975 the Federal Communications Commission opened the way for consumers to attach electronic devices to the network.

The rules were stringent, due to AT&T lobbying, so electronic modems were initially expensive. But in 1981 the Hayes Smartmodem came on the market. It could be plugged directly into a phone line and connected to a computer, with no need for a clunky acoustic coupler. Pioneering hobbyists and cyberpunks, along with ordinary home computer users, could type in the phone number of an online service provider, hold their breath while they waited for the staticky screech that indicated a data connection had been made, and then tap into the virtual communities that formed around bulletin boards, newsgroups, mailing lists, and other online hangouts.

THE WELL

In almost every decade of the Digital Revolution, the amused and amusing Stewart Brand found a way to stand at the locus where technology overlapped with community and the counterculture. He had produced the techno-psychedelic show at Ken Kesey’s Trips Festival, reported on Spacewar and Xerox PARC for Rolling Stone, aided and abetted Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and founded the Whole Earth Catalog. So in the fall of 1984, just as modems were becoming easily available and personal computers were becoming user-friendly, it was not surprising that Brand helped to conjure up the idea for the prototypic online community, The WELL.

It began when Brand was visited by another of the playfully earnest and creative denizens of the idealistic techno-counterculture, Larry Brilliant. A physician and epidemiologist, Brilliant had a compulsion to change the world and have fun while doing so. He had served as the doctor for an American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, sought enlightenment at a Himalayan ashram with the famed guru Neem Karoli Baba (where he first crossed paths with Steve Jobs), enlisted in the World Health Organization’s campaign to eliminate smallpox, and with support from Jobs and the counterculture luminaries Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy founded the Seva Foundation, which focused on curing blindness in poor communities around the world.

When one of the helicopters used by the Seva Foundation in Nepal had mechanical problems, Brilliant used a computer conferencing system and an Apple II that Jobs had donated to organize online a repair mission. The potential power of online discussion groups impressed him. When he went to teach at the University of Michigan, he helped to build a company around a computer conferencing system that had been created on the university’s network. Known as PicoSpan, it allowed users to post comments on different topics and strung them into threads for all to read. Brilliant’s idealism, techno-utopianism, and entrepreneurialism flowed together. He used the conferencing system to bring medical expertise to Asian hamlets and organize missions when something went wrong.

When Brilliant went to a conference in San Diego, he called his old friend Stewart Brand for lunch. They met at a beachside restaurant near where Brand planned to spend the day skinny-dipping. Brilliant had two interwoven goals: to popularize the PicoSpan conferencing software and to create an online intellectual commune. He pitched Brand on a partnership in which Brilliant would put up $200,000 in capital, buy a computer, and provide the software. “Stewart would then manage the system and extend it throughout his network of smart, interesting people,” Brilliant explained.³ “My idea was to use this new technology as a way of discussing everything in the Whole Earth Catalog. There can be a social network around Swiss Army knives or solar stoves or anything.”⁴