text: "AOL for Deadheads" Sociologist Rebecca Adams noted that “Deadheads were electronic pioneers long before it became fashionable to use the Internet or populate the World Wide Web,” with Grateful Dead-related Usenet forums predating the creation of the first WELL conference for Deadheads on March 1, 1986. Musician David Gans, who was hosting an hour of Grateful Dead music on a San Francisco radio station, launched the conference with Bennett Falk and Mary Eisenhart as co-hosts. The creation of the Grateful Dead conference led to a "growth spurt" in the number of WELL members, and in the early years, Deadheads who used its conferences to make plans, trade audiotapes or discuss lyrics were the largest source of revenue for the WELL. Matthew McClure, part of the WELL's original management team, recalled: “The Deadheads came online and seemed to know instinctively how to use the system to create a community around themselves... Suddenly our future looked assured.” By 1997, Eric F. Wybenga's almanac of Grateful Dead resources said the WELL "is to Deadheads what AOL is to the average American online."
  The Electronic Frontier Foundation
  The WELL was the forum through which Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor, the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, first met. Barlow wrote that a visit from an FBI agent investigating the theft of some Apple code made him aware how little law enforcement understood the Internet, and even though he was able to persuade the agent he was not involved in the case, he became concerned about the potential for overreach. EFF was formed in 1990 and Mike Godwin, also a WELL member, was hired as the first on-staff attorney. Barlow and Kapor hosted the EFF conference on the WELL, which discussed topics related to free speech and internet regulation. Godwin helped publicize flaws in a notorious early study of pornography on the Internet, which had led to calls for legislative censorship.