text: In addition to its conferencing services, the WELL also provided access to the Unix operating system for people who didn't have access to an institutional or corporate computer network, and management encouraged members to make and share Unix tools. This was described by early community manager John Coate as an early expression of what would later be called "maker culture." Reflecting back on that era in 1993, Howard Rheingold said that these factors made it an attractive environment for "young computer wizards."
  Policy and governance
  Many early writings about the WELL stress members’ attempts to test utopian forms of self-government in the online community. Kevin Kelly recalled the original goal was for the WELL to be cheap, open-ended, self-governing and self-designing. Cliff Figallo said the "exercise of free speech and assembly in online interaction is among the most significant and important uses of electronic networking," and hoped that the WELL would be a grass-roots alternative to "electronic consumer shopping malls." But members were shaken in 1990 when one popular and active member "scribbled" (deleted) all his posts, then died by suicide, despite other members’ attempts to reach out to him. A few years later, two members involved in a messy real-life relationship posted about it across several conferences, dividing the community and ultimately becoming a central narrative device for Katie Hafner's book about the WELL. "People who had to live with each other, because they were all veteran addicts of the same social space, found themselves disliking one another," Howard Rheingold wrote.