to a comparatively civilized rumble. Debates
were sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had
disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his credit card
numbers.

The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum
for access and storage, and lost money for years--but not enough to
hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the
Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a
gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference
itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing
dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson
debate that could last for months or years on end.

In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like this:

CONFERENCES ON THE WELL

WELL "Screenzine" Digest (g zine)

Best of the WELL - vintage material - (g best)

Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g newtops)

Business - Education
----------------------

Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri)
Brainstorming (g brain) Classifieds (g cla)
Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult)
Consumers (g cons) Design (g design)
Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g disability)
Education (g ed) Energy (g energy91)
Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g home)
Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g invest)
Kids91 (g kids) Legal (g legal)
One Person Business (g one)
Periodical/newsletter (g per)
Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future (g fut)
Translators (g trans) Travel (g tra)
Work (g work)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff)
Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)

Social - Political - Humanities
---------------------------------

Aging (g gray) AIDS (g aids)
Amnesty International (g amnesty) Archives (g arc)
Berkeley (g berk) Buddhist (g wonderland)
Christian (g cross) Couples (g couples)
Current Events (g curr) Dreams (g dream)
Drugs