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PHOTOS: This Is What Craigslist Looked Like In The 1970s
Silicon Valley tends to be ahead of the curve when it comes to tech. And in the case of social media, it seems the area was way, way ahead of the curve. Wired's Daniela Hernandez took a trip to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (home of Google/tech holy land) and found that social media machines have been in the works in the Bay Area for decades.
“This started out as a social experiment to see if people would be willing to share via computer,” wrote Wired, paraphrasing a Community Memory Terminal brochure.
Um, yes, Community Memory Terminal. Yes people would be willing to share via computer.
Silicon Valley can’t take all of the credit, however. While the Community Memory Terminal was being tested in the Bay Area, two grad students at Duke were developing Usenet, another electronic bulletin board, and now one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in use. The launch date of Usenet: 1980.
“There’s nothing new about social media,” wrote Beth Hayden and Rafal Tomal of Copyblogger in a post about social media history. “The Internet has always been social, and it always will be.”