Remembering Community Memory. This excellent story on SFGate traces the history of the very first BBS, run off a teletype terminal in the back of a Berkeley record-store. I actually once wrote an aborted half a novel about the Community Memory project, back when I was about 18, but I'd forgotten all about it since. I wonder where I put it…
Community Memory was born when a group of wild-eyed nerdish Berkeley types started thinking about information systems and community and how they fit together. Ken Colstad, Mark Szpakowski, Lee Felsenstein and Efrem Lipkin were friends and partners, computer-savvy types who wanted to create a simple little system that could function as a source of community information. When the foursome hooked up with a group called Resource One that had access to a mainframe computer, they knew they had the pieces in hand to create their baby.
"We wanted to use the computer to create a sort of information flea market," says Lipkin, who still lives in Berkeley. "We were thinking in terms of cork bulletin boards, community-generated newspapers, things like that. We took this mainframe the size of six refrigerators and put it to use."
