![]() ![]() If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include the appropriate acknowledgements on reprinting. #Lesson 8.6 anyway you slice it answers download. ![]() On March 25, 1995, Tom Mandel sat down at his computer and wrote: Public, that is, to the few thousand people on The Well. It's bad luck to say goodbye before it's time to do so and there's no point in embracing death before one's time, but I thought maybe I'd sneak in a topic, not too maudlin I hope, in which I could slowly say goodbye to my friends here, curse my enemies one more time and otherwise wave a bit at the rest of you until it's just not time to do so any more. I could start off by thanking you all, individually and collectively, for a remarkable experience, this past decade here on the WELL. For better and for worse-there were a lot of both-it has been the time of my life and especially a great comfort during these difficult past six months. I'm sad, terribly sad, I cannot tell you how sad and griefstricken I am that I cannot stay to play and argue with you much longer. It seems almost as if I am the one who will be left behind to grieve for all of you dying. History has already decreed The Well to be synonymous with online communication in its best, worst, and, above all, most vital forms. Though always small in overall numbers, its influence and recognition far outweighed any significance that could be measured by membership or revenues. The Well created a paradox: scruffy, undercapitalized, and armed with a huge amount of clout. It would become a harbinger of both the excitement and the concerns that would arise on the Net over the uses of electronic networks and virtual dialogs, free speech, privacy, and anonymity. The intense connectedness fostered by The Well's relatively feeble technological base has been admired and studied far and wide as a model for the future of sophisticated networked systems. At The Microsoft Network, at AOL-with its multimillion-user base-and at countless other, smaller network providers, people analyze The Well hoping to divine the magic formula that made it so special, so captivating, so unique. In truth, though, as with many great inventions, The Well was mostly the product of creative accident. It wasn't carefully designed or planned it was born of a single idea, and then nurtured by a multitude of competing intellectual visions. Perhaps most intriguing, it began more as a social experiment than as a business proposition. Its destiny, meanwhile, would come to hinge on the still-unanswered question: Can you build a community and a business as one and the same? In later years, this resulted in a great deal of confusion and conflict over The Well's goals. This particular meal occurred one late fall afternoon in 1984 in a restaurant in La Jolla, California, during a conference of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. Larry Brilliant, a physician whose career had been a mix of good works and business ventures, collared Stewart Brand, the leonine publisher of Whole Earth fame. Brilliant, a roly-poly man who had spent years in India on a campaign to eradicate smallpox, had a lot of ideas-and an eye for people who could help him realize them. The lunchtime pitch to Brand went like this: Brilliant had a company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Network Technologies International, or NETI, which sold computer conferencing systems and had recently capitalized itself to the tune of C$8.6 million (US$6.3 million) on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Brilliant believed that computer conferencing was an idea whose time was coming. ![]() He had become convinced of this several years earlier, while presiding over an emergency electronic meeting called to discuss the extraction of a crippled UN helicopter from the Himalayas. But so far, the overall response to NETI had been tepid. This was a technology in search of people who could use it and help it come to life. Brilliant thought he could find that ready-made user community around Stewart Brand. Technology was familiar territory for Brand. He had chronicled the earliest days of personal computers in the pages of Rolling Stone, and in 1974 he had published a book titled II Cybernetic Frontiers. ![]()
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