The Other Computing Counterculture: Community Memory's Public Computing Terminals

• In Event: The Invisible Aspects of Digital Infrastructure

Abstract

My paper analyzes the infrastructure of public computing terminals of the Community Memory (CM) project in California's Bay Area throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. My research of archival materials of the CM project at the Computer History Museum in California reveals an important moment in the development of idealist visions of networking infrastructure. CM’s infrastructure consisted of computing terminals at public locations such as laundromats, senior centers, and activist spaces. I argue that this project demonstrates how early ideas of the Internet did not only view the potential space of the Internet as an unbounded public utility, but that the technology workers of the CM project built the hardware to also provide rudimentary, equalized access to early forms of local networking for all. The aim of the CM project was to construct an alternative infrastructure before, in one CM staffer’s words, “the thing that we're the alternative to has become pervasive.” Such a goal is relevant to contemporary discussions of the maintenance of historically layered infrastructures over time. My paper analyzes the debates over the construction of the terminals—including how to market the class orientation of the project and the physical design of the terminals themselves—in order to show how the CM project constructed an infrastructure of networked community decades before social networking platforms have made such infrastructures commonplace. The visibility—to STS discussions—of other “amateur” networking groups such as the Homebrew Computing Club has overshadowed the CM project and its important alternative infrastructure of networking.

Author

• Joseph Richard DeLeon, University of Michigan