Having never been to Cleveland, I was firmly convinced that I
didn't want to go. To my surprise, my visit was delightful. My
hotel was a 1910 mansion, renovated in 1988 to be warm and to
support modems and
CNN.
Dinner was just a stroll down the block
to another renovated mansion, where I made short work of fresh
rainbow trout, grilled with a pungent caper and garlic sauce. The
conversation around me was, not surprising given the proximity to
Case Western Reserve University, full of graduate-student angst and
plans for monumental careers in the "real world."
Thursday morning, I met Tom Grundner, the founder of the
Cleveland Free-Net and an apostle of populist computing. Grundner became a BBS hacker in 1984 when, as an assistant professor of
family medicine, he was looking for a way to deliver community
health information to the public. His St. Silicon bulletin board was
such a success that, as Tom relates it, "it ate my career."
St. Silicon blossomed and by 1986 had become the Cleveland
Free-Net, a multi-user service running on a UNLY platform with
functionality similar to CompuServe. Users could chat with each
other, could go through bulletin boards, and send mail.
There were, however, some big differences from CompuServe.
For one thing, the service was free to the user. Grundner draws an
analogy to television, where commercial networks fill one niche and
the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) fills another. Grundner sees
the Free-Net movement as the PBS of videotex.
In Cleveland, the network quickly expanded as more and more
volunteers agreed to act as moderators for different topic areas.
Lawyers, doctors, librarians, veterinarians, and many other professionals quickly joined. Rollerskating and SciFi SIGs came into being, until there were more than 400 different topic areas.
While people were using the system, keeping it going was costing money. It was kind of hard to claim that this was tenure-track
research for a professor of family medicine, so Tom looked around
for another institutional home.
He struck a deal with Case Western Reserve University's computer group. They were in the process of spending U.S. $10 million
for an all-fiber campus network but, according to Tom, "no one
gave a thought what to put on it." Cleveland Free-Net became a
university project that also served the community, running on five
Sun servers maintained by the department.
Tom got a salary, a couple of big offices, and a place in the bureaucracy far away from daily control of the Free-Net. Of course, he
still had the ultimate control weapon, the ability to cause a loud fuss
if things went too far off track.
So what to do? In 1989, he started the
National Public Telecomputing Network
(NPTN) and started pushing the Free-Net concept
in other cities and countries. It was to the offices of the NPTN that
Tom had brought me.
Both rooms were jammed with shelves, tables, postage meters,
and ratty old couches, making these offices no different from countless public interest groups all over the country. This was obviously
the kind of place where lots of volunteers spent their evenings.
It was morning, though, and the place was deserted. I sat down
next to a life-size balloon with a skeleton painted on the front.
"Meet my staff," Tom said wryly, while he flitted around the
room checking Macintoshes. He lit a cigarette and sat down in an
easy chair to tell me about his populist computing movement.
The model for a Free-Net was based around a local organizing
committee. This group of volunteers would organize and run the
Free-Net, raising money wherever they could for a multi-user system, a copy of UNIX, and some modems and phone lines. The committee would then get on its collective knees and plead with the
nearest college with a router for Internet access.
Software to run the Free-Net comes from Case Western Reserve
in Cleveland. Long available for only U.S. $1, the University had
gotten stars in its eyes and raised the price to U.S. $850 for nonprofits, and much more to corporations.
In addition to the software, Tom's NPTN group provides what
he had dubbed "cybercasting services." His first cybercasting success was convincing
USA Today to allow him to distribute at low
cost an online, electronic version of the newspaper.
USA Today got
supplemented with a variety of other news feeds.
When the Supreme Court started its
Hermes project to distribute
opinions electronically, it selected 12 groups ranging from the FreeNet and UUnet to UPI, Reuters, and Mead Data. Other information
on current events ("teledemocracy" in Free-Netese) comes from the
Congressional Memory Project. Every week, NPTN takes three Senate bills and three House bills and types in a two- to three-paragraph summary of the bill and how officials voted. The database
builds every week, allowing people to start scanning the voting record of incumbents during reelection campaigns.
Cleveland Free-Net has grown over the years to 40,000 registered users, with 1,000 to 1,500 unique logins per day. Other FreeNets are operational in Cleveland, Cincinnati Peoria, and
Youngstown. There is even a rural Free-Net in Medina County,
southwest of Cleveland. An old, donated IBM RT running AIX is
maintained at a 100-bed community hospital in the county seat. The
local agricultural agent is on the system, as are librarians and other
professionals in town.
Medina County is typical of most Midwestern rural counties. It
is perfectly square and the county seat is in the middle of the
square. A call from anyplace in the county to the seat is considered
a local call. Farmers, practically all of whom have PCs to run their
farms, have a strong incentive to avoid long rides into town.
Grundner felt that Medina County could serve as a model for the
entire Midwest.
Financing Free-Nets is an interesting proposition. In Cincinnati,
Cincinnati Bell sponsors the system. Many of the other sites operate
on a shoestring. Grundner offers two financing models to the local
organizational committees. On the pay-as-you-go model, the local
Free-Net pays for services. A USA Today feed, for example, is based
on the number of lines and will cost a typical Free-Net U.S. $1,000 to
$2,000.
The other model has the Free-Net gather the names and addresses of users and ship them off to Grundner. Grundner, in turn,
sends out tear-stained letters pleading for contributions. Of the five
existing Free-Nets and the five others about to go into existence,
three opted for the pay-as-you-go plan.
Whenever Tom could get a plane ticket abroad, he tried to
spread the Free-Net concept to other countries. Often, though, he
spreads the Free-Net concept by electronic mail, as in the case with
his correspondence to the Helsinki Free-Net or to Richard Naylor in
Wellington.
Grundner was even invited to give a seminar in Singapore,
sponsored by the National Computer Board. I found this a bit
strange as Singapore's government, and especially the NCB, is
pretty much the antithesis of the populist ideas Grundner represents. Interestingly, Grundner was invited back to Singapore, this
time not by the NCB but by the Singapore Microcomputer Society.
The aspect of NPTN that was the most fascinating was Academy
One, a K-12 computer literacy project based at Cleveland Free-Net
that uses the Internet to try and include kids from all over the
world.
Academy One sponsors periodic special events, such as the
TeleOlympics. Any school with an Apple II (or any other cheap system), a modem, and Telnet prompt could participate in the
TeleOlympics.
Four events were picked, including a 50 meter dash, standing
and running broadjumps, and a tennis ball throw. The kids went to
the school yard and ran the events, then came back in and posted
their results.
The day started in New Zealand, then moved on to California,
Cleveland, and ended up in Finland. The Free-Net kept a leader
board of individual results, class averages, and a running news
commentary with late breaking bulletins like "Mrs. Jones and her
4th Grade Class Break into the Lead."
A more sophisticated event was the space shuttle simulation.
University School in Shaker Heights had a full scale mockup of the
interior of the space shuttle, courtesy of a NASA program, complete
with tape loops of the Earth from space running on TVs located
behind the portholes.
With children's games, the kid with the toy gets to name the
game, so University School acted as mission control, running 24-hour simulations of a shuttle run. Other schools got to play other
roles.
A school in California was selected as the alternate landing site.
An alternate landing site has to furnish weather data to mission control, so the kids would go out and gather data on temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. The data would go to mission
control, which would respond with the current shuttle status.
Status information was used to plot the current location on a map.
For all the Academy One events (and for Free-Net as a whole),
the focus is on accessibility. This means cheap and easy to use.
Tom looks with great skepticism at things like gigabit testbeds, preferring instead to convince a librarian to start an online book club.
I dropped off my rental car and went to the airport restaurant
for a nondescript meal, spiced up by an article in the
New Yorker
about a group of Tibetan refugees in Scotland. In a strange form of
cross-cultural exchange, the Scottish
haggis would be used as a base
for the traditional Tibetan
momo dumplings.
Poems by Robert
Burns and the Dalai Lama were read at these affairs. One of the
Tibetans had tactfully suggested to his countrymen that the momos
were even more delicious when doused with liberal quantities of
hot sauce.