“The ways AAs carry the message have changed over the years. The message hasn’t.”
Meetings without a room
For the loners of the 1940s, AA came by mail: letters to the office, the Grapevine and the round robin, as 5 · A loner at sea tells. Members tried the newer lines too. In 1947 the Alcoholic Foundation took its first transatlantic telephone call, from an Army hospital in Germany. In 1953 AA members who were amateur radio operators formed a fellowship of their own, and the next year the Grapevine asked for the signals of hams who wanted to talk over the airwaves.
In 1966, by the Grapevine’s timeline, five groups held the first AA meeting by telephone conference call. In 1970 KUAT, a station in Tucson, Arizona, started AA-of-the-Air, “a radio show for homebound AAs.” By 1990 a public radio program in Connecticut was putting open AA meetings on the air, and the Kansas area’s public information committee had a telephone line with a daily reading from the Twelve and Twelve, Bill W.’s essays on the Steps and Traditions. In the 1990s text telephones let members who were hard of hearing talk with other AAs.
Then came the home computer. The first AA bulletin boards, online meetings and chat rooms appeared in the 1980s. A member with a modem dialed another computer over the telephone line, read the shares other members had left, and typed one of their own. In 1986 a group began meeting on Q-Link, an online service for owners of Commodore computers, and in two years it had 200 members across the country. In 1988 AA’s General Service Office in New York began keeping a list of online groups.
Email came next. The Online Intergroup’s history names a group called Lamp-lighters, formed in 1990, as the first online AA group, and says it “has met by email continuously since then.” The Grapevine’s timeline counts Q-Link, four years earlier, as one of the first. A share sent by email waited in the other members’ mailboxes until they read it, wherever they were.
Members who had met only on screens wanted to meet in person. In March 1994 some of them formed the Living Cyber Committee to host a hospitality suite at AA’s International Convention in San Diego the next year. In the Living Cyber Suite in June 1995, three computers “stayed online continuously with alcoholics around the world,” and online members met face to face. After the convention the committee broke up and re-formed as an intergroup, a service office, for AA’s groups online. The Online Intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous dates its birth to February 1, 1996.
AA’s structure was slower. In 1997 the General Service Conference, the yearly meeting of delegates from the groups, designated online groups “International Correspondence Meetings,” a name that filed them with AA’s meetings by mail rather than with its groups.
It’s 1966, and five AA groups are on the telephone at once, holding the first meeting by conference call. Four years later a radio station in Tucson puts AA on the air for members who can’t leave home.
Then come the home computers. In 1986 a group starts meeting on Q-Link, a dial-up service for Commodore owners, and in two years it has two hundred members. By 1990 a group called Lamp-lighters is meeting by email, and it still is.
In 1995, at AA’s convention in San Diego, members who have only met on screens get together in a hotel suite, with three computers that stay online the whole time. The next year they open an office of their own, for groups that have no address at all.