Claire L. Evans

In 1989, a graduate student named Stacy Horn started an online community. This was before the World Wide Web, when “online” still meant a Bulletin Board System, or BBS, a text window you dialed on the phone and paid for by the hour. Such communities once numbered in the tens of thousands, managed by system operators with a scope of regional and subcultural interests as diverse as anything online today: computer hobbyist culture, dating, politics, and, of course, Star Trek. Since Stacy lived in New York, she named her BBS Echo—the “East Coast Hang-Out.”