Hobbyist inter-networking and the popular Internet imaginary: forgotten histories of networked personal computing, 1978-1998

Popular social computing began in the late‐1970s with the emergence of dial‐up bulletin‐board systems (BBS). For nearly two decades before the privatization of the state‐sponsored internet, tens of thousands of dial‐up computer networks were run out of the homes and offices of hobbyists, volunteers, and entrepreneurs throughout North America. It was on these bulletin‐board systems that personal computer owners first began to use their machines for popular communication. The history of BBSing portrays amateurs, hobbyists, and enthusiasts as key agents in the development and diffusion of social computing. Indeed, the users and administrators of early BBSes were the first to confront the fundamental challenges of living and working in online communities. Their experiences and experiments with anonymity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and trust established norms and values that were reproduced in the commercial services and social media systems to follow. Restoring the popular memory of the BBS movement confers legitimacy on amateur users to speak with authority about the present and future of internet technology and policy.