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Community Memory Terminal

Community Memory Terminal

Image creditThe wub
CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗

Community Memory Terminal

Year
1973
Creator
Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin, Ken Colstad, Jude Milhon, Mark Szpakowski
Company
Community Memory, with Resource One
Location
Leopold's Records, Berkeley, California

Description

Community Memory was a public computer terminal that its founders put in Leopold's Records in Berkeley in 1973, next to a bulletin board. The terminal shown, with a screen and a coin slot, is a later version than the first Teletype printer.

Importance

It was one of the first public bulletin boards on a computer, and anyone could post a notice or search the notices of others. It let people with no technical training use a computer. Like Tymshare, it used a timesharing computer, an SDS-940, but it served the public instead of companies.

Interesting fact

The project kept a version of Community Memory in operation until 1992, almost 20 years after the first terminal.

Sources

  1. Community Memory (Revolution exhibition) ↗Computer History Museum
  2. Community Memory: Precedents in Social Media and Movements (Bo Doub) ↗Computer History Museum · 2016-02-23
  3. Community Memory ↗Wikipedia
  4. Community Memory terminal (catalog 102682838) ↗Computer History Museum