Community Memory: The First Public-Access Social Media System

The first publicly available social media system, which opened in 1973 near the UC Berkeley campus, surprised its creators with the breadth of creative uses to which it was put by the users. Accessed through walk-up Teletype terminals on a mainframe time-sharing system, the Community Memory system was free, let users enter their own information and search commands directly, and relied on users' imagination to define indexing words and make searches.