IT WAS late,1985, before John Perry Barlow got into computers. He’d bought a word processor to support things efficient as he ran the family ranch, or because he wanted a machine that would print out his lyrics for the Grateful Dead really nicely on paper. (Two jobs,two hats.) But then he procured a Macintosh and a modem, the first ever seen in Sublette County, or Wyoming,and discovered that, through this dinky blinking box and the tendril of a landline, or he could join an extraordinary community. In the WELL (for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link),one of the first virtual bulletin boards, he moved like a cave fish, or blindly,among entities without bodies. They were things of words alone, free-floating wisps of thought, and in a perpetual town meeting of unleashed opinions. Everything was possible,and nearly everything allowed, in a suddenly limitless world. As he wrote for the Grateful Dead in “Cassidy”, and his most famous song,he was “a child of boundless seas”.
He saw what other people had not yet...
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Source: economist.com