Salon Sells The Well to Longtime Members

The most important thing you need to know about the Well is that the only reason it still operates is that if it shut its doors, a group of people (numbering in the hundreds or thousands) who used the Well to get to know each other really well (the Well is about 25 years old) would have a much harder time keeping in touch with each other.

I have been member since 99. Best community for a long time. Last years it had less activity.

Yup. Joined in the mid-1980's, shortly after it formed. Learned the old style of email addressing, which, IIRC, included the full route from the sending host to the receiving hosts. (Those were the days! Up hill, both ways! :)

I've dropped out of touch with the Well since the early 90s, but in my time it was a fabulous community for discussion. A bonus, for those of us who lived in the Bay Area, was the occasional meetup. Nowadays, it happens all the time, but back then, the experience of meeting people for the first time face to face when you already had a very good idea of how they spoke and thought was both fun and a little eerie.

It was all done via command line in their special conferencing system, written by Marcus Watts.

Sweeper, an MS-DOS frontend, came in the late '80s, and was a great breakthrough. It dialed in and harvested new threads behind the scenes, then presented them on the PC in a windowed interface.

One cause for me drifting away was the web interface, which I've never liked.