The world’s first public BBS appeared in Berkeley in 1972.

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

Category: Factual Claims

• SHARE: A precise, colorful piece of computing-history trivia — the coin-operated Community Memory kiosk — worth sending to anyone who works on social platforms or community-tech history.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in institutions and community networks, echoing the law-merchant and diamond-bourse work on how reputation and communication systems emerged before corporate platforms.