Lee Felsenstein and the first public computerized bulletin board system

The Community Memory Project, a 1970’s era counterculture experiment co-founded by EECS alumnus Lee Felsenstein (B.S. ’72), is the subject of an article in California Magazine titled “’We’re Using a Computer’: Was Social Media Invented in Berkeley?”  Members of the public were invited  to interface with a carboard box “terminal” where they could enter and retrieve messages on a computer via a teletype machine.  “It was sort of a noisy, sluggish craigslist,” Felsenstein says .  It “…was the first point where spam showed up, the first point for trolling, the first place where people developed personas online.”  An original Community Memory terminal is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.