CommuniTree BBS

In 1979, CBBS went online to the public in Chicago, enabling individuals to read and write messages to and from many other individuals, like a standard bulletin board in the nonvirtual world, where people tack up notices of community interest on a piece of corkboard in a public place. Modems were expensive and slow, and messages weren't structured in terms of topics or conferences, but people were using their PCs and their telephones to communicate, and that in itself was exciting for the first cadres of enthusiasts. Equally important was the fact that neither the communications nor the computer companies had any idea what people like Christensen were up to.

In 1979, the BBS community was restricted almost exclusively to microcomputer hobbyists, and their interests included all kinds of questions--as long as the questions had something to do with how to make personal computers work. People who used the technology to talk about pets and politics and religion would come later. There was one significant exception, however: the CommuniTree BBS in Santa Cruz, California, went online in 1978, paralleling Christensen and Suess's efforts in Chicago. I stumbled onto CommuniTree myself when I first started BBS-hopping, and what I found there impressed me enough to save some of the postings for ten years.

CommuniTree, starting with its name, was specifically focused on the notion of using BBSs to build community, at a time when most other BBSers were still more interested in the technology itself. The Tree was still active in 1982-1983, when I first started exploring the online world. The item that caught my interest enough to print and file it had to do with some people who were designing a new kind of community based on spiritual practice of a nontheological nature. They called it ORIGINS.

ORIGINS started in the "create your own religion" discussion area. In the midst of an overcrowded northern California marketplace for high-priced, highly organized enlightenment for sale or rent, I liked their declaration that "ORIGINS has no leaders, no official existence, nothing for sale. Because it started in an open computer conference, no one knows who all the creators are." The central tenets of the movement were "practices"--actions to be remembered and undertaken in everyday life in the material world. The kind of world the originators of ORIGINS had in mind is wryly evident in the practices its adherents promised to do every day: "Leverage a favor, Ask for help and get it, Use charisma, Finish a job, Use magic, Observe yourself, Share Grace."

I often wondered what had become of them. At the First Conference on Cyberspace in 1990 in Austin, Texas, I ran into somebody who remembered. The CommuniTree BBS had a chance of being the seed for an entire network, but according to one observer who participated in its heyday, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, it fell victim to a problem that continues to plague the BBS community--people who use BBSs as an arena for acting out antisocial impulses. "The students, at first mostly boys and with the linguistic proclivities of pubescent males, discovered the Tree's phone number and wasted no time in logging onto the conferences," Stone recalled, in her presentation to the Austin conference.

They appeared uninspired by the relatively intellectual and spiritual air of the ongoing debates, and proceeded to express their dissatisfaction in ways appropriate to their age, sex, and language abilities. Within a short time the Tree was jammed with obscene and scatological messages. There was no easy way to monitor them as they arrived, and no easy way to remove them once they were in the system. . . .

Within a few months, the Tree had expired, choked to death with what one participant called `the consequences of freedom of expression.' During the years of its operation, however, several young participants took the lessons and implications of such a community away with them, and proceeded to write their own systems. Within a few years there was a proliferation of on-line virtual communities of somewhat less visionary character but vastly superior message-handling capability. . . .

The visionary character of CommuniTree's electronic ontology proved an obstacle to the Tree's survival. Ensuring privacy in all aspects of the Tree's structure and enabling unlimited access to all conferences did not work in a context of increasing availability of terminals to young men who did not necessarily share the Tree gods' ideas of what counted as community. As one Tree veteran put it, `The barbarian hordes mowed us down.' Thus, in practice, surveillance and control proved necessary adjuncts to maintaining order in the virtual community.

CommuniTree's focus on social and spiritual matters was an exception for the era. The first generations of BBSers were the home brewers who had a lot of technical knowledge about how their medium worked. People in a few cities began to set up BBSs. The prices for modems in the early 1980s were high--$500 or more for anything faster than a glacially slow 300 bits per second (most adults can read faster than that). Home-brew telecommunications was still a province for hands-on hobbyists who could debug their own software and configure their own hardware. Then Tom Jennings came along.

CommuniTree (first microcomputer BBS system)

CommuniTree was one of the very first microcomputer BBS systems. The San Francisco–based electronic bulletin-board service (BBS) began in 1978 as a social experiment in free speech and community building. It was shut down as a result of vandalism by young users in 1982. It featured a unique tree-structure for messages as opposed to the conventional timestamp ordering of messages. This allowed users to organize information in a structured way. 

The Communitree software ran on an Apple ][ with 280K of floppy storage. The program was all in RAM so the floppies were entirely available for (compressed) messages and the index. There was nothing to break into, all the messages were available, so there was no real security need for passwords. Another feature was the fairwitnesses, people with passwords, who could hide messages they thought were inappropriate. 

The code was written in a language called Forth, and not documented. 

CommuniTree. Within a few months of the first BBS’s appearance, a San Francisco group headed by John James, a programmer and visionary thinker, had developed the idea that the BBS was a virtual community, a community that promised radical transformation of existing society and the emergence of new social forms. The CommuniTree Group, as they called themselves, saw the BBS in McLuhanesque terms as transformative because of the ontological structure it presupposed and simultaneously created--the mode of tree-structured discourse and the community that spoke it--and because it was another order of “extension,” a kind of prosthesis in McLuhan's sense. The BBS that the CommuniTree Group envisioned was an extension of the participant's instrumentality into a virtual social space. 

The CommuniTree Group quite correctly foresaw that the BBS in its original form was extremely limited in its usefulness. Their reasoning was simple. The physical bulletin board for which the BBS was the metaphor had the advantage of being quickly scannable. By its nature, the physical bulletin board was small and manageable in size. There was not much need for bulletin boards to be organized by topic. But the on-line BBS could not be scanned in any intuitively satisfactory way. There were primitive search protocols in the early BBSs, but they were usually restricted to alphabetical searches or searches by keywords. The CommuniTree Group proposed a new kind of BBS that they called a tree-structured conference, employing as a working metaphor both the binary tree protocols in computer science and also the organic qualities of trees as such appropriate to the 1970s. Each branch of the tree was to be a separate conference that grew naturally out of its root message by virtue of each subsequent message that was attached to it. Conferences that lacked participation would cease to grow, but would remain on-line as archives of failed discourse and as potential sources of inspiration for other, more flourishing conferences. 

References

Communitree archive[1]
Communitree Manual pages[2]
The Virtual Community by Howard Reingold page 136[3]
The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age By Allucquère Rosanne Stone[4]

1. http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/APPLE/II/COMMUNITREE/

2. http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/CommuniTree.html

3. https://books.google.com/books?id=fr8bdUDisqAC&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=communitree+bbs&source=bl&ots=uKZxTbu0Zj&sig=oHKu67sw0iY4Y6V4k4acN9hP0p0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiCk-XShs_cAhWBAHwKHb0jDtkQ6AEwBnoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=communitree%20bbs&f=false

4. https://books.google.com/books?id=QZwsxDlApNwC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq=communitree+bbs&source=bl&ots=puNdF_F3ZE&sig=rrvB7BA4MvjqpOpLxNcJVVRlQsI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjT8sCplc_cAhXrrVQKHWCSBhA4ChDoATABegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=communitree%20bbs&f=false