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Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link

well.com

86 pointsgraderjs64 comments

Some context. The WELL was founded in 1985 (and is still active). Commercial Internet service providers were not widely available until the late 1990s. For threaded public discussions (forums), Usenet was available to people at universities and research labs with Internet connections. Other people connected to bulletin board services (BBSs) with modems. America Online (AOL), Prodigy, and CompuServe were big commercial services; FidoNet was a noncommercial federation of BBSs; and the WELL was a BBS that was mostly known to digerati and deadheads in the SF Bay Area. Apologies to those who know the history (comments? corrections?).

Usenet was more widely available than that, lots of small tech companies and individuals were connected, you didn't need an internet connection, anyone who could swing UUCP (ie a unix box and a modem) could join - the whole continent of Australia joined by air-mailing magtapes (ping times were low)

You didn't even really need a Unix box. There were implementations of Usenet (and the underlying UUCP transport protocol) for other operating systems, for example the Waffle BBS for MS-DOS.

Ah, the joys of getting a $500 long distance phone bill.

I got Usenet via UUCP on my Amiga exchanged with a BBS that in turn exchanged with their upstream over dialup as well, about 4 times a day.

My first "web" access was via CERN's e-mail to www gateway. If I timed it right, and CERNs e-mail gateway was fast enough, I could request a URL, exchange with my upstream, have them send the e-mail to their upstream and download the result in one exchange, and then I'd dial back in 15-20 minutes later and get the page. If I was unlucky I had to wait for the next exchange 6 hours later.

It's my "and we walked uphill both ways, in the snow" story.

I’m still surprise my parents didn’t kill me from long distance bills in high school. I had a BBS that exchanged mail with Fido and Usenet with UUCP. Sadly, the nearest nodes were outside the local calling area.

When a new ISP started up in the next town over, I was so excited to finally have a local number to call.

I ran UUCP on a Mac Plus, of all things. But it was a local call for me.

“Late 1990s” is a bit of a stretch. Dialup ISPs were widespread by the mid-1990s, and there was broad enough demand that third parties shipped TCP/IP stacks on Windows 3.1 before Windows 95 built one in.

You bring back memories for me - I worked for one of the first rural ISPs in Indiana in '95. Having to debug people's Winsock setups over the phone still makes me shudder a bit. Not to mention the Apple customers, where I didn't even have a Mac available to me and I learned by trial and error - pretending like there were dynamic outcomes for every customer "Yes, now read off for me what that screen says."

The fun one was introducing people to basic concepts, like "Ok, that thing is your mouse, see the two buttons? Let me explain how you're going to use them on this call.

Aaaaah, Trumpet!

NetManage! Or WFW 3.1 and win32 extensions to run NCSA Mosaic. Good times.

Trumpet, possibly one of the most commercially pirated pieces of software in the US. Casual piracy was definitely a thing, but many ISPs sent out Trumpet Winsock to their customers without paying a dime.

> Commercial Internet service providers were not widely available until the late 1990s.

Late 80s, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Internet_service_pr...

Usenet was distributed via dialup modems via UUCP ("Unix to Unix copy"); Internet transport via the NNTP protocol was added later. Most Usenet sites were not on the Internet. This was the 80s, the era of crazy expensive long distance phone calls. At that time, commercial use of the Internet was illegal. Usenet was also in effect a federation of BBSs. Small sites would find a neighbor, hopefully a local phone call away, willing to exchange data; you'd set up a cron job to make calls at specific times and new data would be exchanged in both directions.

In the early days, to send mail you had to know a route: send this message to machine A via UUCP mail, then ask A to send it to B via UUCP mail, then B will send it to ucbvax at Berkeley, which is on the Arpanet (the core of what would become the Internet) and have it send to Janus, on Berkeley's separate Bitnet network: all four hosts would be in the address.

  Usenet was available to people at universities and research labs with Internet connections.

Usenet could be used in batch mode over dialup (periodically dial in to a friendly 24x7 server, upload postings, download articles). I participated on various newsgroups this way clear back to 1986.

I remember running a FIDOnet node for a while in the late 80's/early 90's timeframe.

Figuring out long distance vs. local prefixes and next-hop's was half of the fun of it. Routing data long distances while evading long-distance phone charges felt rewarding in a way.

Past threads; I'm surprised there hasn't been more - unless I missed some:

The Epic Saga of the Well (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9892633 - July 2015 (5 comments)

What the WELL's Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754986 - May 2014 (1 comment)

Users of The Well buy The Well from Salon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4554354 - Sept 2012 (8 comments)

Salon Sells The Well to Longtime Members - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4552281 - Sept 2012 (4 comments)

The WELL, Birthplace Of Online Movement, Is Up For Sale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470137 - Sept 2012 (13 comments)

The WELL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552413 - July 2010 (5 comments)

Yeah, I'm surprised the WELL never seems to get a mention around here. And the discussion on your links is fairly sparse.

First found out about The Well from mailer insert in a print copy of the Whole Earth Catalog I found at the library when I was a kid. I got a membership when I was able to afford it and have maintained it off and on since. Surprised to see it on the front page of HN tonight.

I was going to say this was the invention of the internet forum, but the last time I did Stewart Brand told me it wasn't, and I guess he'd know.

Usenet predates it by 5ish years

Was it the invention of the web forum? I don't recall how the WELL was originally implemented.

Picospan by Marcus Watts https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:PicoSpan

It feels basically dead to me, but, more troubling, I think there's some financial shadiness. I joined a few years ago, saw that there were no interesting discussions going on, and tried to quit. To my dismay, I found that there appeared to be nobody willing or able to actually cancel my account and stop charging my credit card---after months and months of emailing and calling to get them to stop charging me, I eventually had to report the unauthorized continuing charges to the bank to get it to stop.

I've been a member for 20+ years, and yeah, it's MUCH less active than it was 10 or 15 years ago, but it's still worth logging in every few days. I have friends there.

I'm sorry to hear about your billing issue. Unfortunately, the back office has always been a little lax. I don't think for a minute their inability to close your account quickly was nefarious or intentionally fraudulent, but of course from your POV the motivation is quite properly irrelevant.

I had pretty much the exact same experience as parent comment. There is no apologizing for software that can quickly and easily accept your credit card number, but drag its feet and require non-existent humans to intervene to stop taking your money. Extremely bad look

I was a huge information society fan back in the day and Kurt Harland gave me his contact info at The Well.

Great community.

A number of famous people have drifted through there over the years, generally without any kind of anonymity. At the Well, your login is whatever you want, but it's tied to your actual real name. IOW, you can have a handle for sure, but there's no provision for shielding your identity.

ISTR Billy Idol (again, under his actual name), Geena Davis, David Crosby, and a few others passing through there with varying levels of participation/longevity.

(SF author Bruce Sterling was there for years without it really being a Famous Author situation, but I think there's ample precedent for that online among genre writers of that era, so it's kind of a different thing. See also the old GEnie SFRT, where Neil Gaiman used to hang out in the 90s, etc.)

Bruce Sterling still shows up once a year for an annual “state of the world” discussion in January.

Just did a double-take seeing this comment. My first exposure to the Well in any form was seeing Kurt's email address next to the autograph on my sister's copy of their first 12".

It looks like this is a web forum, that is supported by user fees rather than advertisers. That's great!

But then I look at the membership pricing, and see that it's $15 per month. For a web message board. And an email address with only 500 MB of space allocated, if you even need that feature.

Is this a for-profit venture for somebody? Or are they using the most inefficient hosting solution imaginable? Why does a text message board need to cost more than a Netflix subscription?

The guy that did the Long Now Foundation and Whole Earth Catalog started The Well in 1985.

It's now run by a group of longtime members.

It's a different way to do things. Intentionally high barriers to entry protect against eternal Septembers and spam.

At a low enough fee, counterintuitively, money is a fairly decent unbiased barrier. It's unbiased in that you don't need to know someone or have specialized knowledge, just the commodity of cash. It's not perfect but it's more blind than most other artificial barriers.

The Well was around before the ubiquitous internet - think of it as a historical (but still live) object rather than a new and upcoming service

Interestingly the pricing indicates that they had a $10/month plan at one point:

> Do you have an Essential Plan membership? This older membership type has been retired, but remaining accounts are grandfathered in at $100/$10 at this time. Contact Helpdesk (at the address shown at the footer of this page) to upgrade to our contemporary Membership offering.

I feel the same way.sdf.org includes web hosting and email for free, and if you want to support them recurring. It's only $36 annually. So it's significantly cheaper.

Well, old users still ssh in and use the console interface. The web interfaced ("Engaged") is a late addition.

The pricing has been stable since the 1990s or so. Sure, it's harder to defend that price level in 2021, but consider that (a) everyone is there with their real legal name and (b) the price keeps spam and trolls away for the most part.

Re: the email limit, I think most everyone I know with an @well.com address forwards it elsewhere. Mine goes to Fastmail.

$0.20/megabyte for overages on web bandwidth, too. Ow! Better hope your home page never makes the front page of HN. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL

> In September 2012, Salon sold The WELL to a new corporation, The WELL Group Inc., owned by a group of eleven investors, who are all long-time members. The CEO was Earl Crabb, who died on February 20, 2015. The sale price was reported to be $400,000

That means in order to recoup their investment, the WELL would need 2,666 paying member-years, to say nothing of expenses along the way.

Also talked about in this podcast episode:

The Dig: Counterculture to Cyberculture with Fred Turner https://www.thedigradio.com/podcast/counterculture-to-cyberc...

Curious about the demographics of the WELL userbase. My impression from language cues in the copy, and from the age of the platform, that the WELL is populated predominantly by graybeards rather than the under-40 crowd. Can anyone confirm/deny?

I don't know about The WELL these days, but yes it came out of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Truck Store culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I remembered the Truck Store was in Menlo Park near the train station, got curious and looked it up. This MoMA page has some fun facts:

https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoT...

In more recent years it was a flower shop:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+...

And now it is torn down for new construction. Somewhat fittingly, the current Google Street View has a truck driving by in front of the vacant lot:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+...

Pop quiz! (Actually I'm genuinely curious.) Can anyone name the typeface used in the FUNCTION and Whole Earth Truck Store headings in the MoMA page? I used to know it well (pun intended) but have forgotten its name.

Back in those days, you used to buy fonts by the sheet. A sheet of rub-on lettering that is. The sheet had characters that were slightly sticky underneath. These were on the back side of the sheet. I mostly used Letraset and Mecanorma sheets.

You would place the sheet so the next letter you wanted was lined up where it should be over the page you were making, and then rub over the letter with a burnishing tool until it came loose from the font sheet and stuck to the paper underneath.

Update! I found these newfangled things called "Google" and "Wikipedia". (Well - pun intended again - I guess I already blew my cover with those Street View links.) Anyway, the typeface was called Windsor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_(typeface)

One more thing... Here's a great photo of Stewart Brand and the gang at the Truck Store:

https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1058035963354583041/photo...

>You would place the sheet so the next letter you wanted was lined up where it should be over the page you were making, and then rub over the letter with a burnishing tool until it came loose from the font sheet and stuck to the paper underneath.

Then the web came along and used up all the "w"'s!

I hated it when I ran out of a letter late at night and University Art was closed!

You are right, I remember the old radio commercials. They chewed up all the w's and spat them out:

"Please visit our World Wide Web Site at aitch tee tee pee, colon, forward slash, forward slash, double-you double-you double-you, period, example, period, see oh emm, forward slash, info, period, aitch tee em ell."

> Pop quiz! (Actually I'm genuinely curious.) Can anyone name the typeface used in the FUNCTION and Whole Earth Truck Store headings in the MoMA page? I used to know it well (pun intended) but have forgotten its name.

...

> Update! I found these newfangled things called "Google" and "Wikipedia". (Well - pun intended again - I guess I already blew my cover with those Street View links.) Anyway, the typeface was called Windsor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_(typeface)

Damn I just saw your update, I was going to chime in with that! Such a cool looking font for print.

i used to love letraset for doing art with

It was so much fun! I mostly did more mundane things like my business cards and letterhead. But still... Seeing something go directly from my brain onto paper, with the help of these magical rub-on letters and symbols and a little bamboo burnishing tool? There was nothing else like it.

i'm under 40 and have been a member for over a decade.

I frequent all of the technology related conferences.

I am sure that you're right that the crowd skews older, but no hard proof.

Great quality of discourse, and great people.

I had someone ship me a big box full of CDs because they were trimming down their collection for simply the cost of shipping, it was a treasure trove of artists i'd never otherwise listen to, and it was an overall great experience; every person-to-person experience I've had that originated from The Well has been great, actually.

The Well had a strong presence online in the early 1990s, when I bought my first modem and joined a BBS in Tokyo with Usenet feeds. I had some friends in Japan who were Well members, people on Usenet with Well e-mail addresses seemed overall like good Netizens (to use a 1990s term), and I considered joining but never did. It’s good to hear that it’s still active.

My experience was that the core demographic definitely skewed older, lefter, more West Coast than your average internet demographic; not necessarily a techie crowd, but with some fairly well-known futurists and tech writers; more literary; people who did Burning Man way before it was mainstream cool; very deep in certain pop-culture areas (the Grateful Dead especially); more emphasis on meeting with other WELLpern in person; with the periphery composed of people drawn in by the legend.

The monthly membership fee discouraged the worst kind of drive-by trolling; which was good. Still very bitter flamewars, and rivalries running for years sometimes.

Isnt it the quality of ideas, willingness to participate, and other 'cyber' qualities that make a site like that what it is?

>Isnt it the quality of ideas, willingness to participate, and other 'cyber' qualities that make a site like that what it is?

Maybe, but different demographics produce ideas and conversation of different character.

I'm close to 40 and I've been a WELL member for over 20 years.

My first impression is that these are probably people who grew up reading the Whole Earth Catalogue.

I'm 51 and have been a member since 1997. One of the most active conferences for a long time was GenX, which was set up (I assume) to counter the otherwise pretty Boomer-heavy balance of the service in the 80s and 90s.

I would not be surprised to discover that the overwhelming bulk of the membership is now > 40 or even >45.

My first two dialup ISPs were The Well and netcom. Actually my very first was a guest dialup on an ATT 11/45 running v6 Unix. I remember getting a snarling note from a netcom admin for using a compiler.

I used Netcom when they first started offering Personal PPP accounts in the early 1990s.

I saw this on the documentary about the unibomber and whole earth catalogue

https://youtu.be/GY6fb59XFbQ?t=1467

The Unabomber was just an 80s-90s techno-utopian played backwards.

He was also a victim of unethical human experimentation, something that I'm sure helped radicalize him. If you read his manifesto it sounds personal in places because the feelings behind it are. There's a line I actually remember about how these scientists "need to be punished." He's globalizing it via his ideology, which is a coping mechanism often employed by trauma victims, but I don't think he's truly talking about "scientists" generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Harvard_College

"In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were turned over to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition.[26] Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly.[26] The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week.[27][28] Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.[29]"

There was no IRB (institutional review board) in those days.

I remember a time in the mid 1980s when it was possible to read the entire content of all usenet groups every day. The novelty soon wore off though as flame wars erupted.

How do these guys check your identity on sign-up, aside from payment info. Do they call you?

Can you reply to individual comments on there in the conference? I've never found out how

You can only post to the end of a topic, but you can link to a previous post that you’re replying to using the post number in angle brackets. For example: <123>

It's not threaded, so no. The conversation in any given Topic is strictly linear.

With Metafilter, I suspect this is one of the last holdouts on that approach.

I might have to try it just to try it

I do remember all the suicide doxing stuff

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