Computer conferencing was first pioneered in Michigan on CONFER, PicoSpan, E-Forum, Caucus and Participate.

[2][3] and commercial ventures [4] Picospan came with a toolbox of software customization utilities that could be used to make changes at the system and user level.

After providing the system with a name and password, they invoked Pico and brought up a long list of conference names like "Theology", "Arts", "Singles", "Twilight", "Health"[10] and various other computer topics which were in turn grouped into themes like "Entertainment" or "Computers".

Once inside, they would find a series of numbered topics or threads each created by a user and each representing an asynchronous conversation.

Marcus Watts had a direct effect on The WELL's culture: PicoSpan prevented censorship by preventing conference hosts (who are empowered to hide or delete any response posted in their forum) from influencing a discussion, by labeling such posts as being "".