Dialing up memories of The Well

— -- The Well is for sale, and with it the address well.com. That signals the end of an era online and the end of a home I've had longer than any physical address in my life. I'm mourning the Well, and perhaps even more mourning a small bit of permanence online that seems likely to go away.

The Well was one of the world's earliest online communities. Founded near San Francisco in 1985, it was an online bulletin board for thousands of geeky, intellectual and counter-culture thinkers before even the Web had come into being. In part because of its policy of giving journalists free accounts, it got a lot of press, but perhaps more importantly it was a place for people who were already thinking a lot about what an online world meant to come together and discuss it.

Its full name was The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. It was a creation of Steward Brand and others, who founded The Whole Earth Catalog. That, for those who weren't a part of 1960s counter-culture, was a printed catalog/magazine/encyclopedia of everything from back-to-the-land tools and advice to information about computers. Think of it as the Maker Culture of its time.

In 1985, Brand and some others were getting into computer and computer-aided communication and decided to start an online bulletin board, which he named The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link — The Well.

Up until the late 1990s, it was all dial-up — your computer called a number and you heard the distinctive whining song of the modem connecting you to the Well. Everything was (and still is, for that matter) text. There were no graphics, no pictures, no sounds or videos. Just words.

Words which, in the famous phrase of the Well, we owned. As in YOYOW — You Own Your Own Words. No one could reproduce what others had written without their permission — but neither could they be anonymous. People could be jerks to each other, but they had to do it face-to-face, so to speak. It made for a very different kind of community, more like a small town than the slime-flinging that one often encounters online these days.

The Well was an amazing place, sort of an intellectually lofty Cheers (that bar where everyone knew your name) with a high geek quotient. It was a trend-setter, a myth destroyer and a definer of what the online world was capable of.

I came to it after its golden era. In 1993, I had just moved to San Francisco and needed an e-mail account, something I'd never had, or needed, before. A friend told me the best place to go to be online was the Well, which I'd never heard of.

I signed up and got my first e-mail account, an address I've maintained to this day.

I thought it was just that, but I was oh so very wrong. Along with the package came entrance to a brand new world. The Well was a community, a sounding board, an agora and an education all rolled into one. I'd come to San Francisco to take a job as the overnight writer at the Associated Press bureau, which meant I had many long hours in the middle of the night waiting to see if The Big One was going to hit. During that time, I explored the Well and from there the Internet (or 'network of connected computer networks' as I was instructed to call it by the AP editors in New York.)

(Oh, and AP quickly made me pay for my account, no freeloading allowed.)