In 1979, CBBS went online to the public in Chicago, enabling individuals to read and
write messages to and from many other individuals, like a standard bulletin board in the
nonvirtual world, where people tack up notices of community interest on a piece of
corkboard in a public place. Modems were expensive and slow, and messages weren't
structured in terms of topics or conferences, but people were using their PCs and their
telephones to communicate, and that in itself was exciting for the first cadres of
enthusiasts. Equally important was the fact that neither the communications nor the
computer companies had any idea what people like Christensen were up to.

In 1979, the BBS community was restricted almost exclusively to microcomputer hobbyists,
and their interests included all kinds of questions--as long as the questions had
something to do with how to make personal computers work. People who used the technology
to talk about pets and politics and religion would come later. There was one significant
exception, however: the CommuniTree BBS in Santa Cruz, California, went online in 1978,
paralleling Christensen and Suess's efforts in Chicago. I stumbled onto CommuniTree
myself when I first started BBS-hopping, and what I found there impressed me enough to
save some of the postings for ten years.

CommuniTree, starting with its name, was specifically focused on the notion of using
BBSs to build community, at a time when most other BBSers were still more interested in
the technology itself. The Tree was still active in 1982-1983, when I first started
exploring the online world. The item that caught my interest enough to print and file it
had to do with some people who were designing a new kind of community based on spiritual
practice of a nontheological nature. They called it ORIGINS.

ORIGINS started in the "create your own religion" discussion area. In the midst of an
overcrowded northern California marketplace for high-priced, highly organized
enlightenment for sale or rent, I liked their declaration that "ORIGINS has no leaders,
no official existence, nothing for sale. Because it started in an open computer
conference, no one knows who all the creators are." The central tenets of the movement
were "practices"--actions to be remembered and undertaken in everyday life in the
material world. The kind of world the originators of ORIGINS had in mind is wryly
evident in the practices its adherents promised to do every day: "Leverage a favor, Ask
for help and get it, Use charisma, Finish a job, Use magic, Observe yourself, Share
Grace."

I often wondered what had become of them. At the First Conference on Cyberspace in 1990
in Austin, Texas, I ran into somebody who remembered. The CommuniTree BBS had a chance
of being the seed for an entire network, but according to one observer who participated
in its heyday, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, it fell victim to a problem that continues to
plague the BBS community--people who use BBSs as an arena for acting out antisocial
impulses. "The students, at first mostly boys and with the linguistic proclivities of
pubescent males, discovered the Tree's phone number and wasted no time in logging onto
the conferences," Stone recalled, in her presentation to the Austin conference.

They appeared uninspired by the relatively intellectual and spiritual air of the ongoing
debates, and proceeded to express their dissatisfaction in ways appropriate to their
age, sex, and language abilities. Within a short time the Tree was jammed with obscene
and scatological messages. There was no easy way to monitor them as they arrived, and no
easy way to remove them once they were in the system. . . .

Within a few months, the Tree had expired, choked to death with what one participant
called `the consequences of freedom of expression.' During the years of its operation,
however, several young participants took the lessons and implications of such a
community away with them, and proceeded to write their own systems. Within a few years
there was a proliferation of on-line virtual communities of somewhat less visionary
character but vastly superior message-handling capability. . . .

The visionary character of CommuniTree's electronic ontology proved an obstacle to the
Tree's survival. Ensuring privacy in all aspects of the Tree's structure and enabling
unlimited access to all conferences did not work in a context of increasing availability
of terminals to young men who did not necessarily share the Tree gods' ideas of what
counted as community. As one Tree veteran put it, `The barbarian hordes mowed us down.'
Thus, in practice, surveillance and control proved necessary adjuncts to maintaining
order in the virtual community.

CommuniTree's focus on social and spiritual matters was an exception for the era. The
first generations of BBSers were the home brewers who had a lot of technical knowledge
about how their medium worked. People in a few cities began to set up BBSs. The prices
for modems in the early 1980s were high--$500 or more for anything faster than a
glacially slow 300 bits per second (most adults can read faster than that). Home-brew
telecommunications was still a province for hands-on hobbyists who could debug their own
software and configure their own hardware. Then Tom Jennings came along.