EclecticGuy

One of my interests and responsibilities as a member of EMC’s Content Management and Archiving (CMA) Group’s CTO Office is “Social Computing“. It occurred to me that I have watched and participated in this area from its very earliest – at least from the perspective of an average technically-inclined citizen. As I thought about my experiences and related them to the current surge in Social Computing, I thought it might be interesting to capture a little history from my perspective.

Back in “the day” we dialed in to on-line communities called bulletin board systems (BBS) using 300 baud modems. My first modem was even acoustically coupled! This was back in the mid 1970s. There were relatively few communities back then – basically any individual with a personal computer, 1 or more modems connected to it, and some central theme or topic could set these up. It was tough to even find what was out there since there were no central directories for these message boards. But some of these BBSes became very valuable for knowledge sharing amongst interested users from all over the country and sometimes, the world.

Even back then I had a lot of interests and I used this new technology (which, of course, was another interest) to find experts and discover knowledge. From the beginning, it was easy to find BBSes that supported communities of early computer geeks – hardware message boards helped me build my first Z80-based computer from scratch and programming boards helped me learn to program it in assembly language. But I also found and participated in BBS sites that specialized in Studebaker cars and their restoration (my first car was a 1957 Silver Hawk), black powder gun making and shooting, archery, remote controlled model airplanes, remote controlled model cars, and one of my favorites, a fly fishing BBS with trip reports, techniques and fly tying patterns.

The Usenet and commercial BBSes with subscription fees started to emerge – CompuServe, Q-Link/AOL, and too many others to recall. By the mid 80s you could, with a little effort, find information on most any interest you might have. What was amazing about all of these, was that they had very active user communities that were willing to share their knowledge, help newbies, and just socialize. These were the precursors to today’s Web Forums. I think many of the earliest participants may have come out of the Amateur Radio world (btw, amateur radio operators were one of, if not the, first to use technology to create virtual communities consisting of members from all over the planet. They still do in fact).

These early BBSes offered 2 primary capabilities; 1) the ability to traverse a file directory and download or upload documents and 2) threaded discussions with other members. Virtual communities were simple but effective then. There was a lot of camaraderie on these early BBS sites with very few lurkers – most sites had near 100% participation. This was probably due to the fact that It took a fair amount of effort to find and visit these sites, so users that stuck around after their first visit or 2 stayed engaged.

As the internet became accessible to the masses, most of these BBSes gave way to Usenet and commercial forums like CompuServe. For a short time in the early 1990s, Gopher was hot but it quickly gave way to the new, very cool World Wide Web (WWW). The Web really lowered the accessibility bar (a good thing BTW). Now people from all over the world can form communities for all topics imaginable. In just a few decades a completely new, universally accessible and extremely rich communication and social networking infrastructure was created more or less organically. Even though Social Computing is a hot topic today, people have been leveraging computers and networks to help and learn from one another for quite some time.

Here are a few of my favorite communities (in no particular order) in which I actively participate:

Pelican Porsche Forum

Early Porsche 911S Registry

Fly Tying and Rod Building Forums

New England Kayak Fishing

RC Groups

Facebook

LinkedIn

Photography-On-The-Net