A sense of Well being

Fri, 31 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"The world's
most influential online community:" That's how Wired magazine described the Well in a cover story two years ago. And that's, of course, in perfect keeping with the original goals of Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand and software entrepreneur Larry Brilliant, who started the seminal community 15 years ago -- on April 1, 1985. The two, inspired by existing bulletin board services
(BBSs), figured they could create something kind of cool if they set up their own BBS and invited exceptionally interesting people to participate.

Soon a gaggle of writers, artists, scientists and thinkers struggled with the arcane posting software and began conversing online, developing "virtual" relationships and roughing-out guidelines for acceptable behavior
in a text-based community. After a few years, some "Wellbeings," as they called themselves, expressed consternation that the group had grown so big
and prolific that people could no longer read all the new posts in a day. But they didn't give up -- in fact, it seems they just wrote more; these days, it's not unusual to find 90,000 words of new posts to the public "conferences" or topic areas in a day.

Salon.com > Farai Chideya

A sense of Well being