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5 unusual facts about Community Memory


Community Memory

The record store and its bulletin board brought together drummers seeking fusion guitarists, bagel aficionados looking for sources, and the first poets of the medium, notably one who went by the nom de plume of Benway - the first net personality.

In his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy described how the founders of Community Memory began the organization.

It was written in QSPL and ran on an SDS 940, an early timesharing system the size of eight refrigerators, originally used by Douglas Engelbart in The Mother of All Demos, which had been donated to Resource One for community use.

Community Memory was created by Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein, acting as The Community Memory Project within the Resource One computer center at Project One in San Francisco.

Lee Felsenstein

Felsenstein was the engineer for the Community Memory project, one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in public places to facilitate social interactions among individuals, in the era before the commercial Internet.



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