There were no personal
homepages. There was no World Wide
Web. Only the Internet. Small groups
of people huddled in virtual communities
like the Well,
TWICS, IRC, MUDs, BBSs, and Usenet. Here
is what I consider the foreshadowing of
the personal homepage phenomenom.
Masahuru and Mieko
Howard Rheingold of the
Well records in 1990 that he was invited
to speak at a Hypernetwork conference in
Oita, Japan. The local organizers of the
conference were all members of a virtual
community known as COARA, which began in
1985 as a community database and public
computing resource. Howard writes:
"The first information they
put up for public use was a train
timetable for Oita. The thirty founding
COARA members decided that they wanted to
put in more information, but they weren't
sure what kind of information would
attract more usage, so they created a
simple public forum to communicate about
it. People started to communicate
informally. Then something happened that
seemed to precipitate the evolution of a
community.
"More than a dozen COARA
members I interviewed mentioned that the
community really began with the advent of
online autobiographical reports from a
high-school student named Masahuru Baba, a
very skilled computer programmer. 'But
when he started writing online about what
it was like to be a high-school boy,'
Fujino told me, 'COARA became much more
interesting. Hearing about the real life
of a high-school student was more exciting
than publishing a lot of dry information.
People started to log on more regularly to
find out what was going to happen, and to
talk about it with each other. We began to
realize the value of people-to-people
interaction. We decided we wanted to be
able to write more personally.'
"One of the most energetic
members of the thirty to fifty people who
always can be counted on to show up for a
COARA event is a housewife who started
learning to use a computer for word
processing. 'Although after I found
COARA,' Mieko Nagano told me, 'I learned
that the computer can do more than word
processing. It can help me interact with
people's minds and hearts.' Just as the
autobiography of a high-school student
turned out to be fascinating to the mostly
older community, the strongly stated point
of view of a housewife with grown children
turned out to win attention by the mostly
male COARA population."