Computers: Here Come the Networkers

Mike Greenly had been trying for weeks to interview Ed Koch about New York City's handling of the AIDS epidemic when he finally buttonholed the mayor on the steps of city hall. "There I was," Greenly typed into his portable computer soon afterward, "cheek to jowl with His Honor." Two hours later he had plugged his Tandy Model 100 into a telephone line and dispatched the first installment of his exclusive interview.

Greenly was not reporting for any newspaper or wire service. For the past two years the former vice president of Avon Products, who always dreamed of being a news correspondent, has been acting out his journalistic fantasies by covering events, writing stories and transmitting them by modem to the mainframe computer of the Source, an electronic information service. That enables any of the Source's 60,000 subscribers to call up Greenly's stories on the screens of their computers and, if they wish, to respond with comments of their own.

Greenly calls himself "planet earth's first interactive electronic journalist," and is probably the most widely read writer on the Source. But he is only one of the many unforgettable characters turning up on computer screens these days. Just as radio and television spawned new personalities and stars, the rapidly growing computer networks, from humble electronic bulletin boards to giant information supermarkets, are breeding their own celebrities.

On CompuServe, with 240,000 subscribers, nearly everybody knows Terry ("Cupcake") Biener. She is the Valley Stream, N.Y., housewife who writes Cupcake's Column, an electronic tattle sheet that reports on the real-life romances of couples who meet on the network. For example, two people whose "handles" on CompuServe were Angel and Malaprop were married last September in a California ceremony filled with "flowers, balloons and water pistols." At the Old Colorado City Electronic Cottage, a bulletin board in Colorado Springs, Colo., used by 8,500 buffs, Proprietor David Hughes does a sort of man-on-the-street reporting he calls "saloon journalism." Operating out of a local bistro with a portable PC, he lobbies against the growing legislative threats to his "electronic freedom of speech," urging others to join the fight.

In the San Francisco Bay area, the place to be is the Well, where Counterculture Editor Stewart Brand files wry comments on current affairs in the telegraphic style he perfected in the Whole Earth Catalogs. On the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) in Newark, Murray Turoff, co-author of the influential Network Nation, brainstorms with a highbrow group of 1,200 executives and writers that has included such luminaries as Author Alvin Toffler.