26 January 2011
As we have been busy updating the Fulcrum website and finally uploading pages for Facebook and Twitter, we were interested to read that contrary to popular belief, there's nothing new about social networking!
In a side street in Berkeley California, the epicentre of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones found what could well be the birthplace of the phenomenon.
"Standing outside what was once a shop called Leopold's Records, former computer scientist Lee Felsenstein told me how, in 1973, he and some colleagues had placed a computer terminal in the store next to a musicians' bulletin board - of the analogue variety.
They had invited passers-by, mainly students from the University of California, Berkeley, to come and type a message in to the computer.
Back then, it was the first time just about anybody who was not studying a scientific subject had been allowed near a machine.
"We thought that there would be considerable resistance to computers invading what was, as we thought of it, the domain of the counterculture," Mr Felsenstein explained.
"We were wrong. People would walk up the stairs and we had a few seconds in which to tell them, 'would you like to use our electronic bulletin board, we're using a computer.'
"And with the word computer their eyes would lighten, brighten up and they'd say: 'wow, can I use it'?"
Soon the machine was filling up with messages, everything from a poet promoting his verses and musicians arranging gigs, to discussions of the best place to buy bagels.
The project, called Community Memory, survived on and off for more than a decade, installing more computers across the San Francisco area. But it was not until the 1980s that much of a crowd came to online life."
Source BBC News, Rory Cellan-Jones