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.)

Writing about what I found there led to a gig as a national writer with AP, with the unenviable title of Cyberspace Writer (really, it said so on my cards), and after several years, a new position at USA TODAY, covering technology out of Silicon Valley. That's morphed into a stint as a biotech writer, science writer and now a breaking news writer.

During the whole of it, my personal e-mail address stayed the same. In fact, because AP didn't start giving reporters e-mail addresses until several years later, I had to use my Well address as a contact in columns I wrote about the Internet in the late 1990s. It was cleverly titled "On the Net," written for an audience (i.e. most of America) for whom the Internet was about as foreign as Mongolia.

Over time, the rest of the world caught up with the Well. Eventually, the World Wide Web came along. Everything got big and everything got free and suddenly the $15 a month for an account on the Well seemed like a lot of money when you could sign up for as many addresses as you wanted at Hotmail or Yahoo or Gmail for nothing at all but your demographic information.

So after 27 years as a community of often extremely un-like-minded souls, the Well is up for sale. It's been a long time coming. The Well was bought by the online magazine Salon.com in 1999. Salon tried to sell it in 2005 but couldn't find a buyer. Now Salon's in debt, and the Well is once again for sale. Its last three employees were laid off last month.

To potential buyers, the millions of words that make up the backyard-fence musing of thousands of people over more than a quarter of a century are worthless junk. What's really worth money is the address — well.com — which many on the Well say a hospital or drug company or some other health-minded entity will snap up for millions.

Only 2,693 subscribers remain in the community, which has the feel of a once-vibrant small town that's slowly dying as the young people leave. But it's certainly not dead. People still sign up, though they're few and far between. And the Well folk are even now busy self-organizing ways to save the content and perhaps even save the Well itself by buying it outright. Whether that's even possible is unknown.

For myself, my life moved from the virtual world to the physical. I got married, had kids and the hours I'd had for sitting in front of the computer chatting with folks disappeared. At a certain point, I ceased to be 'of the Well' and become just 'on the Well.'

But my e-mail address stayed the same. Today I'm contemplating losing that longtime stake in cyberspace and my own connection to a community I loved deeply. It's as if someone was selling my childhood home, one I still visited occasionally. I've moved house, moved jobs, spent time in multiple countries, but people could always find me at that same address, just 12 characters long. In almost two decades of changing circumstances, it's been surprisingly permanent.

And now it's going away, to be sold to the highest bidder. I don't begrudge that, certainly no one owed me an e-mail address. The folks on the Well understand it's not a charity.

But for many of us, for a not-so-brief, shining moment, it was Camelot online, a place of deep discourse, amazing thoughtfulness, online shouting matches that read like especially heated graduate seminars, a community that didn't quit — in short, a home online.

If it does go away, it will be sorely missed.