Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous. Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the *Whole Earth Catalog.* This Point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The *Whole Earth Catalog,* and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a National Book Award.
With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the *Whole Earth Catalog* had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine incarnation, *CoEvolution Quarterly,* the Point Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."
*CoEvolution Quarterly,* which started in 1974, was never a widely popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor, *CoEvolution Quarterly* failed to revolutionize Western civilization and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked a fine line between impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness. *CoEvolution Quarterly* carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white graphics. It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly by subscription and word of mouth.
It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers. And yet -- it never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in, year out, decade in, decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support the magazine. The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in the way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes hard to understand what held them together (if the often bitter debate in the letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").
But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by. Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer, *CoEvolution Quarterly* suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation had discovered the computer revolution. Out came the *Whole Earth Software Catalog* of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie- dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of digital counterculture. *CoEvolution Quarterly* folded its teepee, replaced by *Whole Earth Software Review* and eventually by *Whole Earth Review* (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold).
1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" -- the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link." The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.
As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and remained one. It was local to San Francisco. It was huge, with multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary. Its complex UNIX-based software might be most charitably described as "user-opaque." It was run on a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit cultural foundation in Sausalito. And it was crammed with fans of the Grateful Dead.
Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board. Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings") were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended to work in the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications, media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and journalists were especially common on the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."
There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft. No one used handles. Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a comparatively civilized rumble. Debates were sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his credit card numbers.
The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum for access and storage, and lost money for years -- but not enough to hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that could last for months or years on end.
In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like this:
CONFERENCES ON THE WELL
WELL "Screenzine" Digest
(g zine)
Best of the WELL - vintage
material - (g best)
Index listing of new
topics in all conferences - (g newtops)
Business - Education
--------------------
Apple Library Users Group(g
alug)
Agriculture (g agri)
Brainstorming (g brain)
Classifieds (g cla)
Computer Journalism
(g cj)
Consultants (g consult)
Consumers (g cons)
Design (g design)
Desktop Publishing (g
desk)
Disability (g disability)
Education (g ed)
Energy (g energy91)
Entrepreneurs (g entre)
Homeowners (g home)
Indexing (g indexing)
Investments (g invest)
Kids91 (g kids)
Legal (g legal)
One Person Business
(g one)
Periodical/newsletter(g per)
Telecomm Law (g tcl)
The Future (g fut)
Translators (g trans)
Travel (g tra)
Work (g work)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff)
Computers, Freedom &
Privacy (g cfp)
Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility (g cpsr)
Social - Political -
Humanities
-------------------------------
Aging (g gray)
AIDS (g aids)
Amnesty International
(g amnesty)
Archives (g arc)
Berkeley (g berk)
Buddhist (g wonderland)
Christian (g cross)
Couples (g couples)
Current Events (g curr)
Dreams (g dream)
Drugs (g dru)
East Coast (g east)
Emotional Health****
(g private)
Erotica (g eros)
Environment (g env)
Firearms (g firearms)
First Amendment (g first)
Fringes of Reason (g fringes)
Gay (g gay)
Gay (Private)# (g gaypriv)
Geography (g geo)
German (g german)
Gulf War (g gulf)
Hawaii (g aloha)
Health (g heal)
History (g hist)
Holistic (g holi)
Interview (g inter)
Italian (g ital)
Jewish (g jew)
Liberty (g liberty)
Mind (g mind)
Miscellaneous (g misc)
Men on the WELL** (g mow)
Network Integration
(g origin)
Nonprofits (g non)
North Bay (g north)
Northwest (g nw) P
acific Rim (g pacrim)
Parenting (g par)
Peace (g pea)
Peninsula (g pen)
Poetry (g poetry)
Philosophy (g phi)
Politics (g pol)
Psychology (g psy)
Psychotherapy (g therapy)
Recovery## (g recovery)
San Francisco (g sanfran)
Scams (g scam)
Sexuality (g sex)
Singles (g singles)
Southern (g south)
Spanish (g spanish)
Spirituality (g spirit)
Tibet (g tibet)
Transportation (g transport)
True Confessions (g tru)
Unclear (g unclear)
WELL Writer's Workshop***(g www)
Whole Earth (g we)
Women on the WELL*(g wow)
Words (g words) Writers
(g wri)
**** Private Conference
- mail wooly for entry
***Private conference
- mail sonia for entry
** Private conference
- mail flash for entry
*Private conference
- mail reva for entry
# Private Conference
- mail hudu for entry
## Private Conference
- mail dhawk for entry
Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
---------------------------------
ArtCom Electronic Net
(g acen)
Audio-Videophilia (g aud)
Bicycles (g bike)
Bay Area Tonight**(g bat)
Boating (g wet)
Books (g books)
CD's (g cd)
Comics (g comics)
Cooking (g cook)
Flying (g flying)
Fun (g fun)
Games (g games)
Gardening (g gard)
Kids (g kids)
Nightowls* (g owl)
Jokes (g jokes)
MIDI (g midi)
Movies (g movies)
Motorcycling (g ride)
Motoring (g car)
Music (g mus)
On Stage (g onstage)
Pets (g pets)
Radio (g rad)
Restaurant (g rest)
Science Fiction (g sf)
Sports (g spo)
Star Trek (g trek)
Television (g tv)
Theater (g theater)
Weird (g weird)
Zines/Factsheet Five(g f5)
* Open from midnight
to 6am
** Updated daily
Grateful Dead
-------------
Grateful Dead (g gd)
Deadplan* (g dp)
Deadlit (g deadlit)
Feedback (g feedback)
GD Hour (g gdh)
Tapes (g tapes)
Tickets (g tix)
Tours (g tours)
* Private conference - mail tnf for entry
Computers
---------
AI/Forth/Realtime (g
realtime)
Amiga (g amiga)
Apple (g app)
Computer Books (g cbook)
Art & Graphics (g
gra)
Hacking (g hack)
HyperCard (g hype)
IBM PC (g ibm)
LANs (g lan)
Laptop (g lap)
Macintosh (g mac)
Mactech (g mactech)
Microtimes (g microx)
Muchomedia (g mucho)
NeXt (g next)
OS/2 (g os2)
Printers (g print)
Programmer's Net (g net)
Siggraph (g siggraph)
Software Design (g sdc)
Software/Programming
(software)
Software Support (g ssc)
Unix (g unix)
Windows (g windows)
Word Processing (g word)
Technical - Communications
--------------------------
Bioinfo (g bioinfo)
Info (g boing)
Media (g media)
NAPLPS (g naplps)
Netweaver (g netweaver)
Networld (g networld)
Packet Radio (g packet)
Photography (g pho)
Radio (g rad)
Science (g science)
Technical Writers (g
tec)
Telecommunications(g tele)
Usenet (g usenet)
Video (g vid)
Virtual Reality (g vr)
The WELL Itself
---------------
Deeper (g deeper)
Entry (g ent)
General (g gentech)
Help (g help)
Hosts (g hosts)
Policy (g policy)
System News (g news)
Test (g test)
The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye a dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-climbing Hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life confessions with bisexual word-processing Tibetans.
But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each of these conferences was a little cyberspace world in itself, comprising dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics. Each conference was commonly frequented by a fairly small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a few dozen people. It was humanly impossible to encompass the entire Well (especially since access to the Well's mainframe computer was billed by the hour). Most long- time users contented themselves with a few favorite topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray elsewhere for a taste of exotica. But especially important news items, and hot topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire Well community.
Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry Barlow,
the silver-tongued and silver- modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead, ranked
prominently among them. It was here on the Well that Barlow posted his
true-life tale of computer-crime encounter with the FBI.