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Posted 8-17-99
Cleveland Free-Net, which debuted at Case Western Reserve University in 1986 as the nation's first free community telecomputing network, helped illustrate the value of making a variety of information available electronically.
But technologies like the World Wide Web which are more modern, offer better graphic appeal, and boast faster transfer speeds for even multimedia information have made Free-Net obsolete.
"All the functionality exists in other forms, many times over," said Raymond Neff, vice president for information services. "At 13 years old, Free-Net has had a very good run. That's a very long time in computer time."
The aging system, which is not year 2000 compliant (meaning it cannot function properly once the year 2000 arrives), will cease operating in September.
Free-Net access to news readers (including Usenet newsgroups) and to the online "chat" area will cease September 1 for community users. All other Free-Net activities will end September 30.
CWRU faculty, staff, and students who have been using Free-Net to check e-mail, read Usenet newsgroups, or change passwords will need to switch to other methods of conducting these activities, such as using Eudora for reading e-mail, Netscape Navigator to surf the Web, and Netscape Communicator to read newsgroups.
Detailed instructions are on the World Wide Web at http://www.cwru.edu/net/nutshell/miscl/free-cwru.html. Those who do not yet have Web access can request printed instructions by visiting the Information Services Help Desk in 105A Kelvin Smith Library, or sending e-mail with your campus or U.S. mail address to help@po.cwru.edu.
Alumni can contact the Office of University Alumni Affairs about the CWRUser program, which offers lifelong e-mail addresses for CWRU's graduates.
Former CWRU faculty and staff should contact a commercial Internet service provider (ISP) to set up a new e-mail account and obtain alternative World Wide Web access. A number of free e-mail services exist nationwide.
Anyone who is saving old e-mail messages in a Free-Net mailbox should save copies elsewhere before the system goes off-line.
Until last semester, Free-Net was the only way to access Usenet newsgroups from off-campus sites. CWRU's news server now permits "authenticated newsreading," which means that anyone with a CWRUnet user-ID and password can read CWRU groups from anywhere in the world through a graphical newsreader.
A growing number of faculty, staff, and students have been using point-to-point protocol (PPP) dial-in lines to access CWRUnet from homes or off-campus offices. "People are used to the speed and convenience of computers that can do PPP," said Sharon Scinicariello, head of the Curriculum Support Group in the University Library.
Many people who have been using Free-Net from off-campus sites are using the more modern means of network access on campus, she added, and this should help them make the transition from Free-Net to PPP-based services.
Free-Net "was an experiment to get people to use the network," Neff said, by offering free e-mail addresses and access to a variety of online resources to anyone in the world. At the time of Free-Net's birth, network use and accounts on many campuses were generally restricted to faculty and students in computer science departments and other technical areas.
"It showed that if more information was available, and easier to get to, people would use it more," Neff added. The explosion of the World Wide Web is further testament to this.
Free-Net can trace its roots to St. Silicon's Hospital, an online resource for medical questions. Thomas Grundner founded the system while an assistant professor in CWRU's Department of Family Medicine.
St. Silicon's expanded into Free-Net with the additions of information resources and open discussions in the areas of the arts, science and technology, education, business, recreation, culture, and politics.
Free-Net has offered a number of historical, religious, and literary documents online, including the Magna Carta, Constitution, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Gettysburg Address, the Bible, Book of Mormon, the Koran, Aesop's Fables, Paradise Lost, and Moby Dick.
In addition to being the first free community computer network in the country, Free-Net and its affiliated systems in other cities made history in 1992 by serving as the first public online source of position papers from presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and George Bush.
A similar "Campaign '90" program brought information on gubernatorial candidates Anthony Celebreeze and George Voinovich to Free-Net through a joint project with the League of Women Voters.
When the U.S. Supreme Court decided to offer full-text opinions online in 1990, Free-Net was one of the first 12 networks -- and the only public one -- which the court chose as electronic repositories for these documents.
Free-Nets in Cleveland and dozens of cities throughout the country and around the world also hosted educational activities through the Academy One program. Among these online school collaborations were space shuttle simulations and the TeleOlympics ("virtual" track-and-field competitions). The inaugural TeleOlympics in 1992 united 11,000 students in seven countries and 12 U.S. states for competitions in running, jumping, and throwing. Some students competed from their wheelchairs.
Free-Net began with 10 phone lines and 700 users. As word spread about the system and its resources, use quickly grew, and in its heyday community dial-in lines were often at maximum use from early morning until late in the evening. Neff said the all-time record was 430 simultaneous users.
The system frequently registered more than 150,000 log-ins per month from a total pool of nearly 300,000 campus and community users.
When Free-Net went online in 1986, only 15,000 people nationwide used the Internet, according to Neff. Now more than 50 million people surf the Web.
"Nobody knew when we started this experiment whether people would use services like this," Neff told local public radio station WCPN 90.3 FM in an interview aired August 4. Resources like the Web " weren't even a vision in anybody's mind when we got started," he added.
Rather than mourning the end of an era with Free-Net's impending discontinuation, "we are actually celebrating the completion of a very successful experiment," Neff added. "It is a magnificent success, and it's time to move on to the next generation."
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