Johnny Ryan's new book A History of the Internet and the Digital Future has just been released and is already drawing rave reviews. Ars Technica is proud to present three chapters from the book, condensed and adapted for our readers. This third installment is adapted from Chapter 6, "Communities based on interest, not proximity," and it traces the development of online communities from the first email lists through the WELL and later developments.

Chapter 6: Communities based on interest, not proximity

Individuals like to be networked. Since the beginning of human experience, the tyranny of geography dictated who one hunted with, warred against, and procreated with. Hunter-gatherer bands were drawn together by the pursuit of local resources. Tribal allegiances were tied to kinship and common belief, all human relations were determined by the narrow constraint of proximity. Though distances had contracted since cave dwellers first rolled a tree trunk as a wheel, no invention had yet liberated the social animal from the constraints of geography. Neither rise of empires nor advances in communications or lengthening of trade routes lifted the yoke of geography from human relations. The journey time between New York and Boston had fallen from 5,000 minutes by overnight express stagecoach to a mere 300 minutes by motorcar in the century and a half before 1950. This, however, was only a slight loosening of proximity's hold. Yet, in the years of the mid 1950s to mid 1960s, a decade before networking took its first experimental steps, a careful observer could discern the first signs that humanity was about to liberate itself from the grip of geography. They appeared in the form of a blind teenager named Joe Engressia.

Killing geography

In 1957, Joe Engressia first realized that he could control the phone system and make long-distance phone calls at no cost by whistling a specific pitch down the phone line. The AT&T phone network used twelve combinations of six audio tones as control signals. Engressia's whistles through the mouthpiece were interpreted as the phone company's own control tones. Engressia was one of a scattered group of technologically curious teenagers across the United States who spent their free time experimenting with controlling the phone system. These kids called themselves "phone phreaks." Many were blind and were to some extent socially isolated among kids their own age. It was the phreaks, however, who first liberated themselves from reliance on their proximate peers. Theirs would be a community drawn together by the attraction of common interest rather than the strictures of geography.

In 1968 Engressia was caught by the phone company and disciplined by the University of South Florida where he was enrolled. The ensuing media coverage made him a figurehead for isolated communities of phone phreaks sprinkled around the country. He started to receive phone calls from phreaks across the US. Many of the kids who phoned Engressia sought a wider community of kids like themselves, lonely and isolated. Through the phone network they could meet other similarly gifted and disadvantaged kids. An exposé in Esquire in 1971 cited one example: Ralph, a pale, overweight, pimply sixteen-year-old boy who lived in a California suburb. His parents, according to the reporter, did not understand what Ralph and his friends were doing with the phone, or whether it was legal, but because he was blind they were content that he had found a hobby that kept him busy. In fact what Ralph was doing was entirely illegal. He and three other phreaks were attempting to establish a permanently open line into which phreaks across the nation could tap. Previously, a permanently open line, nicknamed the "2111 Conference," had allowed isolated kids to join a conversation with phone phreaks across the country.

The phreaking phenomenon had spread quickest among blind children. First, they were sensitive to sound and perhaps better suited to the auditory aspect to learning the tones that operate the phone system. Second, some blind kids went to winter and summer camps specifically for blind children, from where the secret spread among their peers who then returned to various scattered towns. Phreaking spread beyond the blind community by way of John T. Draper, known by his nickname "Captain Crunch." Crunch had learned from one of the blind young phone phreaks that the toy plastic whistle given free with "Cap'n Crunch" breakfast cereal made the precise 2,600-cycle tone required to seize control of the telephone network. He, along with members of the MIT hacker community and the Homebrew Club, spread phone phreaking beyond the blind community.

By the 1980s the community was so defined and self aware that it had established norms and conventions to which its members loosely adhered. One such convention, according to two phreaks called "Taran King" and "Knight Lightning," was that "real phreaks can think up a creative name." As another guide said in a mock Ten Commandments style:

Use not thine own name when speaking to other phreaks, for that every third phreak is an FBI agent is well known... Let not overly many people know that thy be a phreak, as to do so is to use thine own self as a sacrificial lamb.

Since the criterion for admission to this community was the capacity to phreak the phone system, all participants shared a common interest in learning more about the phone system. It was both the enabler and focus of their community. Within the community, those with the most refined mastery of the phone system enjoyed elevated prestige. A medium that allowed this, even in so primitive a way as the phone system did, was powerful. Yet something much more powerful than a jerry-rigged phone system was coming.

In 1960, J.C.R. Licklider, the visionary behind networking, and Robert Taylor, the manager at ARPA who set the ARPANET project in motion, made a pretty far-fetched prediction. Startling, in fact. They predicted that:

In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face... We believe that we are entering into a technological age, in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information—not merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it.

In an era when computers were simply giant data processors and users were kept at a respectful remove by a bureaucratic priesthood of computer administrators, this was heady stuff indeed.

Yet even as Licklider and Taylor wrote the change was beginning to occur. Cambridge Professor John Naughton recalls noticing the emergence of a sense of community among students using Cambridge's time-share computer in the late 1950s. Because they could directly operate the machine and were simultaneously connected to the same computer from different terminals, the time-share students were able to swap electronic messages and socialize in a manner inconceivable to students toiling under the batch-process system. Naughton, meanwhile, was still using the old batch-processing system. He and his peers "didn't even recognize each other except as members of the same queue" for processing time. The ability to leave messages for others on the same machine, even without networking, transformed the computer from a processor of instructions into a communications device. Robert Taylor at ARPA had also observed that people using time-sharing at research centres were forced to speak to one another and pondered, "couldn't we do this across the country?" It was clear that interactive and shared computer systems were more socially constructive then their bureaucratic, centralized predecessors.

From the early 1960s, screen to screen messages became common on time-share systems. In early 1971 an RFC was circulated that proposed using the ARPANET to swap messages between connected facilities. This proposal seems not to have advanced beyond the assumptions of the ink age, proposing a "mechanism to receive sequential files for immediate or deferred printing," rather than making the leap to sending a message composed on a screen at one facility to be read on a screen at a different facility or even from teletype to teletype. Then, in late 1971, human communications took their first steps beyond the ink age. At BBN an engineer named Ray Tomlinson was working on a protocol for sending files across the network. He made a mental leap and realized that the file transfer protocol he was working on, called CPYNET, could also carry messages as files across the network if he incorporated it into an existing time-share message program called SNDMSG. The adjustments were "a no brainer." Tomlinson sent the world's first e-mails to his group announcing his discovery. If they intended to use it, he told them, they should use an "@" sign to designate when the recipient was based at a different host computer elsewhere on the network. Thereafter a series of programs refined the e-mail idea and implemented it on different computers. Messages could now be sent from one screen on the East Coast of the United States to another on the West Coast in no time at all. This, unsurprisingly, was a big deal.

E-mail consumed two-thirds of the bandwidth connecting ARPANET facilities almost as soon as it was invented. Leonard Kleinrock, who directed the ARPANET Network Measurement Center at Stanford University, monitored the rise of e-mail first hand:

The point at which it became abundantly clear to me that people-to-people communication was the dominant form of traffic carried by the Internet was in mid-1972 shortly after email was introduced to the internet... E-mail traffic took over the traffic very quickly. Prior to that, the traffic was mainly file transfers and remote use of computers by researchers who logged on to machines that could be accessed through the net.

One of Tomlinson's colleagues joked that he could not tell his boss what he had done "because e-mail wasn't in our statement of work." E-mail was a completely unplanned addition to the ARPANET, and came as a surprise to both ARPA and BBN. As a BBN retrospective report on the ARPANET reflected in 1981, "the largest single surprise of the ARPANET program has been the incredible popularity and success of network mail."

Within a few years of its invention, e-mail had evolved into more than simply a medium for one to one correspondence. It became a medium for group discussions. In 1975 an e-mail distributed among a large community of recipients started the first discussion group, "MsgGroup." In one of the first postings to the group Steven Walker suggested a set of principles that have characterized much of Internet discussion ever since:

I would encourage a FORUM-type setup if its not to difficult to setup, realizing that many (myself included) will have little time to contribute. I worry that such arrangements tend to fragment the overall group but maybe thats good if the fragments report in now and then.

So was born the discussion list, an ever-lengthening conversation with many participants discussing topics of common interest. Science fiction, a natural subject of interest for a community of computer scientists, became a popular topic of ARPANET chatter: a discussion list called "SF-Lovers," became the most popular list on ARPANET. So popular, in fact, that the frequency and bulk of messages sent to the SF-Lovers discussion list consumed so much of the network's bandwidth that managers at ARPA had to shut the list down for a period of months. Remarkably, considering that the network was funded by the Department of Defense with the intention of sharing of expensive computer resources for research, SF-Lovers' moderator successfully argued that the list was providing valuable experience dealing with large lists and should be reinstated. Thus did a military-sponsored network become a tool for informal human chatter.