yelvington.com

I just discovered that the Andy Rubin who's working on Google's phone project, profiled in the New York Times by John Markoff, is the same Andy Rubin who ran the Spies in the Wire multiuser Citadel system back in the 1980s.

Citadel was a "bulletin board system" -- software that let users post public messages and engage in discussions. When I first went online in 1985, I fortunately stumbled across Citadel systems in Minneapolis, where I lived.

In a day when many bulletin boards were dominated by file pirates and combative teen-age boys, the discussion-focused Citadel systems attracted intelligent and mostly polite grownups including lawyers, business owners and local TV personalities. Users regularly got together for offline events. When I built a home in White Bear Lake, MN, nearly everyone at our housewarming party was a Citadel user sporting a nametag with his or her online "handle."

I wound up running a Citadel bulletin board with several hundred users, setting up international networking and writing a monthly Citadel newsletter.

The Citadel community process, which included open-source development of the software, shaped much of my thinking about the online medium. When I had an opportunity to build an online news system in 1994 at the Star Tribune, the community conversation component was at the top of my list of requirements.

One variant of Citadel is still around, an open-source groupware server maintained by Art Cancro. It's all grown up now, but somewhere under the hood there's still a terminal interface suitable for 300-baud dial-up access.