Th' Dead not only allowed taping, they encouraged it: at the shows I attended, there was invariably a small grove of microphones set up near the soundboard, in the middle of the audience.
I'd love to hear more about your experience and observations of taping at the shows.
Not only did GD (and particularly Jerry Garcia and John Perry Barlow) eschew the 'intellectual property' model of music, their thought-leadership has lived on to become much of what we today consider fundamental internet technology and methodology.
Early decentralized crypto-economics, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation were all developed by some combination of deadheads and musicians and tapers, particularly on an internet service called The WELL.
The Green Pill Podcast had an entire episode exploring the bluegrass roots of blockchain technology; I was humbled / psyched to be a guest and play several of my songs, as well as some traditionals that GD also played. It's here if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3s9Fu4yu7o&t=2898s
It's almost impossible to talk about The Dead and not talk about LSD.
Owsley (wall of sound engineer) was one of the original major LSD manufactures... and a dead show was always where you went to score ACID if you lived on the east coast. This remained true well into the 90's.
I'm going to guess that all of those early internet pioneers that you mentioned also have fond stories of LSD.
The Dead, Bill graham, hells angles, peoples temple, Patty Hearst.... There is a continuum of culture that spills out of San Francisco to this very day.
> I'm going to guess that all of those early internet pioneers that you mentioned also have fond stories of LSD.
What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff is exactly that. A dive into how psychedelic counterculture made its mark on folks at Stanford, folks at XEROX PARC, Doug Engelbart, Jim Fadiman, Steve Jobs, etc. Not the most cohesive narrative but fascinating stories
In a little surfing, I've turned up https://bostonglobe-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/FyeO9... but not a picture from a little later that I know existed in hardcopy (probably from shortly after 29.12.1970?) of Dr. Leary (in the snow?) at a ski station, celebrating the refusal of the request for his extradition.
Barlow wrote the famous "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence) in 1996, famous in its time but also somewhat poignant, given the commercialization of the internet not long after.
Barlow was also big on the WELL, an early influential time-sharing messaging system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL a Bay Area legends from a time when the Bay Area dominated in both technology and music). In many ways Hacker News is an intellectual inheritor of the WELL (along with Usenet and Slashdot).
I was a bit too young to get too many shows (I saw one in 1993 and a couple of JGB after that), but I have extremely fond memories of going to the local head shop in my town that had a massive tape collection. You would bring 6 blank tapes and pick 5 from their library that they would copy for you and keep the other blank as payment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taper_(concert)
(a disadvantage to too much ethology reading: I can't remember "Bill Graham Presents" without thinking of baboon behaviour)