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The WELL
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL or The Well, is a virtual community founded in 1985. It is one of the oldest continuously operating virtual communities. By 1993 it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12, and gross annual income of $2 million. A 1997 feature in ''Wired'' magazine called it "The world's most influential online community." In 2012, when it was last publicly offered for sale, it had 2,693 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. Discussion topics are organized into conferences that cover broad areas of interest. User anonymity is prohibited. History The WELL was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985. The name follows the naming of some of Brand's earlier projects, including the ''Whole Earth Catalog''. Initially The WELL was owned 50% by The Point Foundation, publishers of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review, and 50% by NETI Technologies Inc. a ...
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Virtual Community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communities are online communities operating under social networking services. Howard Rheingold discussed virtual communities in his book, '' The Virtual Community'', published in 1993. The book's discussion ranges from Rheingold's adventures on The WELL, computer-mediated communication, social groups and information science. Technologies cited include Usenet, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon) and their derivatives MUSHes and MOOs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), chat rooms and electronic mailing lists. Rheingold also points out the potential benefits for personal psychological well-being, as well as for society at large, of belonging to a virtual community. At the same time, it showed that job engagement positively influences virtual communities of ...
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Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold (born 1947) is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities. Biography Rheingold was born on July 7, 1947, in Phoenix, Arizona. He graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1968. His senior thesis was entitled ''What Life Can Compare with This? Sitting Alone at the Window, I Watch the Flowers Bloom, the Leaves Fall, the Seasons Come and Go''. A lifelong fascination with mind augmentation and its methods led Rheingold to the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Xerox PARC. There he worked on and wrote about the earliest personal computers. This led to his writing '' Tools for Thought'' in 1985, a history of the people behind the personal computer. Around that time he first logged on to The WELL – an influential early online community. He explored the experience in his seminal book, '' The ...
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Katie Hafner
Katie Hafner (born December 5, 1957) is an American journalist and author. She is a former staff member of ''The New York Times'', and has written articles and books on subjects including technology and history. She co-produces and hosts the podcast series ''Lost Women of Science''. Her first novel, ''The Boys'', was published in 2022. Early life and education Hafner was born in Rochester, New York, and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. She earned a bachelor's degree in German literature from the University of California at San Diego in 1979 and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1981. Career Beginning in 1983, Hafner worked as a reporter at ''Computerworld'' and then at '' The San Diego Union''. She became a staff editor at ''Business Week'' in 1986, leaving in 1989. From 1990 to 1994, she worked freelance, writing articles and books, before becoming technology correspondent at ''Newsweek''. In February 1998 she became a writer for th ...
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Kevin Kelly (editor)
Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of ''Wired'' magazine and a former editor and publisher of the ''Whole Earth Review''. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. Life Kelly was born in Pennsylvania, United States, in 1952, and graduated from Westfield High School, Westfield, New Jersey, in 1970. Through his father, an executive for ''Time'' who used systems analysis in his work, Kelly developed an early interest in cybernetics. He attended the University of Rhode Island for one year, studying geology. Kelly has traveled extensively, backpacking in Asia. While travelling in the Middle East, he had a conversion experience and became a born-again Christian. He was raised Catholic. He lives in Pacifica, California, a small coastal town just south of San Francisco. He is married to the biochemist Gia-Miin Fuh and has three children: Kaileen, Ting, and Tywen. Among Kelly's personal involvements ...
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Internet Service Provider
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned. Internet services typically provided by ISPs can include internet access, internet transit, domain name registration, web hosting, and colocation. History The Internet (originally ARPAnet) was developed as a network between government research laboratories and participating departments of universities. Other companies and organizations joined by direct connection to the backbone, or by arrangements through other connected companies, sometimes using dialup tools such as UUCP. By the late 1980s, a process was set in place towards public, commercial use of the Internet. Some restrictions were removed by 1991, shortly after the introduction of the World Wide Web. During the 1980s, online s ...
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EIES
The Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES, pronounced ''eye An eye is a sensory organ that allows an organism to perceive visual information. It detects light and converts it into electro-chemical impulses in neurons (neurones). It is part of an organism's visual system. In higher organisms, the ey ...s'') was an early online conferencing bulletin board system that allowed Real-time computing, real-time and asynchronous communication. The system was used to deliver courses, conduct conferencing sessions, and facilitate research. Funded by the National Science Foundation and developed from 1974-1978 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) by Murray Turoff based on his earlier EMISARI done at the now-defunct Office of Emergency Preparedness, EIES was intended to facilitate group communications that would allow groups to make decisions based on their collective intelligence rather than the lowest common denominator. Initially conceived as an experiment in com ...
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Bulletin Board System
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running list of BBS software, software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user performs functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public Internet forum, message boards and sometimes via direct synchronous conferencing, chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as M+NetMail, NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email. Many BBSes also offered BBS door, online games in which users could compete with each other. BBSes with multiple phone lines often provided chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networking service, social networks, and other aspe ...
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Dial-up Internet Access
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line which could be connected using an RJ-11 connector. Dial-up connections use modems to decode audio signals into data to send to a Router (computing), router or computer, and to encode signals from the latter two devices to send to another modem at the ISP. Dial-up Internet reached its peak popularity during the dot-com bubble with the likes of ISPs such as Sprint Corporation, Sprint, EarthLink, MSN Dial-up, NetZero, Prodigy (online service), Prodigy, and America Online (more commonly known as AOL). This was in large part because broadband Internet did not become widely used until well into the 2000s. Since then, most dial-up access has been replaced by broadband. History In 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis (computing), Jim Ellis, g ...
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Civility
Civility may denote orderly behavior and politeness. Historically, civility also meant training in the humanities. Developmental model Adolf G. Gundersen and Suzanne Goodney Lea developed a civility model grounded in empirical data that "stresses the notion that civility is a sequence, not a single thing or set of things". The model conceives of civility as a continuum or scale consisting of increasingly demanding traits ranging from "indifference" to "commentary", "conversation", "co-exploration" and, from there, to "habituation". According to the authors, such a developmental model has several advantages, not least of which is that it allows civility to be viewed as something everyone can get better at. Empathy in civility Many experts say civility goes beyond good manners and listening attentively, but includes sharing our own beliefs and values with others through some type of engagement with the intent of sincere respect towards one another. This also requires a willingness ...
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Mt Xinu
mt Xinu (from the letters in "Unix™", reversed) was a software company founded in 1983 that produced two operating systems. Its slogan "We know Unix™ backwards and forwards" is an allusion to the company's name and abilities. mt Xinu offered several products: * mt Xinu was a commercially licensed version of the BSD Unix operating system for the DEC VAX. The initial version was based on 4.1cBSD; later versions were based on 4.2 and 4.3BSD. * more/BSD is mt Xinu's version of 4.3BSD-Tahoe for VAX and HP 9000, incorporating code from the University of Utah's HPBSD. It includes NFS. * Mach386 is a hybrid of Mach 2.5/2.6 and 4.3BSD-Tahoe/Reno for 386 and 486-based IBM PC compatibles. mt Xinu produced interoperability software for Macintosh and Unix, including an AppleShare server for Unix. The company's principals were University of California, Berkeley computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science ...
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Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS/ Solaris), HP/ HPE ( HP-UX), and IBM ( AIX). The early versions of Unix—which are retrospectively referred to as " Research Unix"—ran on computers such as the PDP-11 and VAX; Unix was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from the 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language (in 1973), which allows U ...
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C (programming Language)
C (''pronounced'' '' – like the letter c'') is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted Central processing unit, CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems code (especially in Kernel (operating system), kernels), device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. A successor to the programming language B (programming language), B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the most widely used programming langu ...
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