Community Memory
A terminal in a Berkeley record shop in 1973 that let anyone leave and search messages — the first public electronic bulletin board.
Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin and a few others from Berkeley's counterculture put a Teletype in the entrance of Leopold's Records and connected it by modem to a time-shared SDS 940 in San Francisco. The point was that computers should serve the neighbourhood, not just governments and corporations. People searched by keyword and posted their own notes: musicians wanted, rides offered, poems, and soon a fair amount of nonsense.
The experiment lasted only a couple of years, but it showed what BBSes and The WELL later built on: ordinary people will happily talk to strangers through a machine, and they will talk about everything except what was planned. Felsenstein went on to be a central figure in the Homebrew Computer Club, and the project was revived in the mid-1980s with coin-operated terminals.