CommuniTree BBS

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CommuniTree was one of the very first microcomputer BBS systems. The San Francisco–based electronic bulletin-board service (BBS) begun 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 in to, 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 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.

With each version of the BBS system, The CommuniTree Group supplied a massive, detailed instruction manual--which was nothing less than a set of directions for constructing a new kind of virtual community.

Communnitree archive

Communitree Manual pages

The Virtual Community by Howard Reingold page 136

The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age By Allucquère Rosanne Stone

References

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