Abstract : The KOM computer conferencing system was developed and used by a group of people at the Stockholm University Computing Center in Stockholm in the years 1976-1990. This paper, written by one of the people behind the KOM system, tells of how the system came to be developed and describes important occurences in the history of the system. The first version of KOM was operating in 1977, which means that KOM was one of the very first computer systems of the kind which is nowadays known as "social computing".

In the middle of the 1970-s, Murray Turoff, inventor of the Emisari and Eies computer conferencing systems, came to Sweden and made some presentations of his ideas. Palme and Tholerus listened to him, and were immediately caught by the ideas. Another listener to Turoff was Tomas Ohlin. A year later, Ohlin worked at the Swedish Board of Technical Development (STU). He used STU funds to finance a number of experiments with use of computer to aid ordinary people. One of the projects which he financed was to obtain a copy of the Planet-Forum computer conferencing system, which was installed at the Stockholm University Computing Center, QZ. Tholerus modified the program to use Swedish-language commands.

In the beginning of the 1970-s, several researchers connected to the Datalogy laboratory at Uppsala University discussed the fact that computers mainly, at that time, were used as large systems used by large organizations to control people. Would it not be possible to design computer systems to aid ordinary people, to let them control the use of the computers instead of using computers to control ordinary people.