The WELL
The WELL — the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link — was founded in February 1985 in Sausalito, California, by Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Larry Brilliant. Its conferencing software was PicoSpan, and Brand’s founding term was “You Own Your Own Words.” It is still running.
cousins, not twins: the WELL and TMN
The editor asks the question head-on: how are The WELL and Caucus/TMN related — coincidence, “like chimps coming up with food washing concurrently on different islands?” The record supports three distinct answers, and they should not be blurred. Documented kinship: the software. PicoSpan and Caucus are both descendants of CONFER (1975) — an Ann Arbor history calls Marcus Watts’s PicoSpan and Charles Roth’s Caucus CONFER’s “direct descendents” — so the two networks ran on cousin software written from the same ancestor. Documented contact: the worlds touched at the level of people and associations — TMN stood in the founding consortium of the Electronic Networking Association in 1985, an association founded by an MDG partner, Lisa Kimball; but no source consulted places The WELL itself inside that consortium, or shows TMN and The WELL dealing with each other directly. Convergence: the rest — hosts, real names, conferences, item-shaped talk, two communities arriving at the same social machinery from the same 1970s inheritance, on opposite coasts, in the same decade. The chimp analogy holds for the culture. For the code, they were family.
A Grateful Dead conference opened on March 1, 1986, and brought the first growth spurt; the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation first met there; Howard Rheingold made it the central case of The Virtual Community (1993), and a 1997 Wired history called it the world’s most influential online community. Inside it, in 1986, Carl Loeffler and Fred Truck set up the Art Com Electronic Network, where Judy Malloy published Uncle Roger (1986–87), the first online hyperfiction; Malloy also founded the WELL’s Arts conference. The WELL is still running — its conferences continue, reached now by SSH or the web — and My Name is Scibe still stands on Malloy’s pages there. The sister edition’s wiki carries the fuller entry: The WELL at scibe.org.
consulted sources
Wikipedia, “The WELL” — the founding, PicoSpan, hosts, You Own Your Own Words, the EIES influence
Wikipedia, “CONFER (software)” — PicoSpan and Caucus as its progeny
Katie Hafner, “The Epic Saga of The Well,” Wired (1997) — “the world’s most influential online community”
The sister edition’s wiki: The WELL
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