Searching Community Memory Posts in 1987

Community Memory was a digital bulletin board “for the unmediated sharing of information for use by the general public” (Farrington 1987) deployed in three generations around Berkeley, California from 1974 to 1991. With terminals placed in public places, members of the public could read and write messages to each other, entertain themselves, find information, and conduct business. In 1987, a staff member at the Community Memory Project created a report on users' search patterns, which survived to be archived at the Computer History Museum. This dataset is a rare glimpse into how a non-computer enthusiast, pre-Internet general population used a proto-social network. By analyzing the dataset using NLP techniques, we find the top three search clusters, each about a fifth of the total, are 1) buying and selling products (“for sale”), 2) debate and general discussion, and 3) searching for posts by prominent personalities. Unexpectedly, erotic-related queries are the fourth most popular…