It all feels so new, doesn't it? Facebook. FaceTime. Google+ hangouts. Hashtagging your memories on Twitter and Instagram.
But this holiday season, as you and your enormous collection of Apple gadgets spend all your extra time connecting with distant friends and family over the latest and greatest social media services, it's worth remembering that all this social stuff was a long time coming.
Before Facebook and Facetime and Google+ and Twitter, there was
Plato and the Bell Picturephone and the Dynabook and the Xerox LiveBoard. Social media is nothing new. It just has better packaging -- and better marketing.
LiveBoard doesn't ring a bell? You've never heard of Plato? It's time for a little history lesson (just click on the images above). Before you sit back with your eggnog and your iPad and your Tumblr, take a few spare holiday moments to appreciate the social media creations of decades past. Your Tumbling iPad wouldn't be here without Alan Kay's DynaBook. You'd be left with nothing but eggnog -- and a holiday hangover.
Above: Community Memory Terminal (1973)
Three decades before Yelp and Craigslist, there was the Community Memory Terminal.
In the early 1970s, Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski and Lee Felsenstein set up a series of these terminals around San Francisco and Berkeley, providing access to an electronic bulletin board housed by a XDS-940 mainframe computer.
This started out as a social experiment to see if people would be willing to share via computer -- a kind of "
information flea market," a "communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually expressed interest," according to a brochure from the time.
What evolved was a proto-Facebook-Twitter-Yelp-Craigslist-esque
database filled with searchable roommate-wanted and for-sale items ads, restaurant recommendations, and, well, status updates, complete with graphics and social commentary.
"This was really one of the very first attempts to give access to computers to ordinary people," says Marc Weber, the founding curator of the Internet History Program at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
Photo: Daniela Hernandez/Wired
