What's Old Is New: The First Public BBS Ran in a Berkeley Record Shop in 1973
charles_irl · x · 2026-09-13
The poster links to Wikipedia's entry on Community Memory, remarking that history repeats itself—"first as farce, then as tragedy."
Community Memory, established in Berkeley in 1973, was the world's first public computerized bulletin board system, built by Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin and colleagues at the Resource One computer center in San Francisco. It connected an SDS 940 timesharing machine via a 110-baud link to a Teletype terminal inside Leopold's Records, letting anyone post and search messages.
Originally envisioned as a resource-sharing network for counter-cultural organizations, it quickly became a general-purpose "information flea market" used for art, literature, journalism, commerce and social chatter—demonstrating early on how unmediated two-way communication media get repurposed by users.
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