The WELL

The WELL—the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, at well.com—is a virtual community founded in February 1985 in Sausalito, California, and one of the oldest continuously operating online communities in the world. It descends from the counterculture’s paper network: Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, co-founded it with physician and entrepreneur Larry Brilliant, and its first owners were the Point Foundation (publishers of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review) and NETI Technologies. Members rechristened the founders’ initials-heavy name with typical license: the thing was simply “the WELL”, and to log on was to go down to it.

The machinery was modest and the design was not. The WELL ran on a VAX 11/750 minicomputer—“a quarter of a million dollars and a closet full of telephone lines and modems”—and its conferencing software was PicoSpan, written by Marcus D. Watts for NETI, whose license to use it was part of NETI’s founding investment. Members dialed in by modem; in the 1990s the WELL became one of the original dial-up gateways to the Internet. It ran its own email system, charged by the hour and by the month, and organized all of its talk the PicoSpan way: into conferences, and within conferences, into topics.

The conferences are the WELL’s enduring invention: bounded rooms, each on a subject—arts, health, business, music, politics, and hundreds more—each tended by hosts who guide the conversation. Names are real: anonymity is prohibited, and a member’s login can always be resolved to the person behind it, which was argued from the start to keep the talk honest and the community intimate. Stewart Brand set the founding terms in the member agreement as “You Own Your Own Words”—read three ways at once: you are legally responsible for what you post; your words are your copyright; and say it, and live it down. The current agreement keeps both the rights and the responsibility with the member.

The culture that formed there is documented internet history. Early pricing concentrated the membership in the San Francisco Bay Area; a Grateful Dead conference that opened on March 1, 1986, brought the Deadheads and the WELL’s first growth spurt; monthly office parties from September 1986 carried the community into physical rooms. The founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation first met on the WELL; Steve Case and Craig Newmark were members before AOL and Craigslist. Howard Rheingold took the WELL as the central case of The Virtual Community (1993), the book that gave online community its first ethnography, and Wired’s 1997 history of the system, Katie Hafner’s “The Epic Saga of the WELL”, called it the world’s most influential online community.

The WELL is also where electronic art lived. In 1986 Carl Loeffler and Fred Truck set up Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) inside the WELL as an “electronic exhibition space”, and it was there that Judy Malloy published Uncle Roger, the first online hyperfiction; Malloy also founded the WELL’s Arts conference. The WELL is therefore not incidental to Scibe: it is one of the work’s two birthplaces—the other is in ARTS WIRE—the venue of its WELL half, and the host that has kept the whole work readable, on Malloy’s pages at people.well.com, since 1994.

Ownership has passed hand to hand without breaking the thread: from the Point Foundation and NETI to Rockport founder Bruce Katz (1994–99), to Salon (1999), and in September 2012—after Salon sought a buyer and members pledged to save the community—to The WELL Group, Inc., owned by eleven longtime members, at a reported price of $400,000. Members gather now by SSH or the web. The conferences continue, and Scibe still stands where its author put it.

Sources and further reading