The first public BBS was a physically located 1972 Berkeley kiosk.

Evidence

In 1972, the world’s first public bulletin board system (BBS) appeared in the form of a coin-operated kiosk at the top of the stairs to Leopold’s Records in Berkeley. It was called Community Memory, and it contained a teletype machine connected via a 110-baud modem to 24-foot-long XDS-940 time-sharing computer in San Francisco. Every day, over and over, the modem made and received calls to the San Francisco computer, ultimately printing messages for users on the teletype machine. Community Memory had been installed by a group of three computer-science dropouts from UC Berkeley, who placed it below the store’s physical bulletin board in the hopes that it would serve the same purpose, just more efficiently. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 563

Categorization

• SHARE: A precise, quirky tech-history tidbit for someone into pre-internet networking history.
• FICTION: A network requiring physical travel and slow service is a striking conceptual seed for an imagined society.
• XREF: connects to: The world’s first public BBS appeared in Berkeley in 1972.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The world’s first public BBS appeared in Berkeley in 1972.

Broader Connections

• The world’s first public BBS appeared in Berkeley in 1972. #corroborates (0.98)