The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link Sold To Its Members

New submitter nadaou sends this quote from the NY Times: "One of the earliest online communities, The WELL, has a new owner: its members. On Thursday evening, Salon Media Group, the previous owner of The WELL, said it had sold the community to the Well Group, a private investment group consisting of longtime members of the community, which was founded in 1985, long before the rise of the Web."

Comments

Back to the roots

[arth1]

Slashdot was more than a little influenced by WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), and today's WELL web interface (there's also a telnet interface) looks more than a little like Slashdot did when it first started.

I for one am proud of my @well.com address, and welcome our new wellpern overlords.

Re:Back to the roots

[wordsnyc]

I've been a member since ~1994. I drive by about once a week, get into a conversation every few weeks. It's like the general store that somehow survived the mega-mall built next door. Conversations tend to be very sane, with a complete lack of the idiotic noise you get in places like this.

Wink Wink Nudge Nudge?

[SJ2000]

Is someone giving us a less than subtle hint?

CIX - older and hopefully bigger

[clickclickdrone]

In the UK we still have CIX which predates the well a little and hopefully has more than 2000 members but it's a shadow of it's former glory when it counted Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett amongst its regular users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIX/

For those who like them some history....

[sootman]

Wired, May 1997 - The Epic Saga of The Well

McClure shared an office with someone from the Whole Earth Software Catalog. His computer, a Compaq, sat on a piece of white plywood board; he cadged a stenographer's chair from the Whole Earth office. It was high tech in the middle of funk, and funk wasn't the ideal setting in which to launch a cutting-edge enterprise. The building had no insulation to speak of, and the roof leaked. In the summer the office was an inferno, and in the winter the temperature indoors dipped into the 50s. The computer room, a modified closet, was just big enough for the disk drive and CPU cabinets. A window-mounted air conditioner -- the largest unit Sears sold -- cooled the VAX.