Free As In Internet

Today in Tedium: At a time when it feels like significant parts of the internet can suddenly fall under the control of wealthy people seemingly more focused on causing chaos than improving digital infrastructure for the vast majority of people, it can easily be forgotten that so much of the modern internet came from public, or not-for-profit roots, where digital culture was not about the size of your following, but about getting everyone online. It wasn’t just about who had the largest megaphone or the biggest axe to grind, but about building and ensuring access to information for the largest number of people. At this time, the center of the digital universe wasn’t Silicon Valley or anywhere that a bunch internet oligarchs live today. It might just be in your hometown—especially if you live in Cleveland. It was a time before Logan Paul, a time when Web1 didn’t even really exist. Today’s Tedium ponders the Free-Net, the way people got on the internet before the internet cost money. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s GIF comes from the movie Johnny Mnemonic.

The Cleveland skyline. (Erik Drost/Flickr)

The heart of the Free-Net is in Cleveland, and from what I’ve seen, I believe them

In the 1980s, Cleveland was on an upward swing municipally—with one of the city’s most popular and successful mayors, George Voinovich, helping to set the path forward after a disastrous tenure under Dennis Kucinich—even as the city itself faced elements of recession due to its status as a Rust Belt city.

A 1982 New York Times article put the situation as such: “Boom and Bust Overlap in Cleveland.”

On the boom side of things was the city’s fast-growing medical field, most famously in the form of Cleveland Clinic, which emerged as one of the country’s most prominent health providers starting in the 1980s. Long affiliated with Case Western Reserve University, the medical provider would get even bigger in later years.

Despite all that, there’s evidence that the most interesting hospital associated with Case Western in the 1980s might have been a facility with no physical building—certainly not one with the scope of Cleveland Clinic.

Certainly, “St. Silicon’s Hospital and Information Dispensary” could not compete with Cleveland Clinic in most of the ways that mattered. There was no door to walk through if you had an emergency, and it wasn’t like a doctor could even give you a diagnosis—the doctor couldn’t even see you.

But its lack of traditional features, in some ways, was a virtue. You didn’t need an appointment, and you could get medical information from St. Silicon any hour of the day. You could even ask questions—and possibly even get an answer from a trained medical professional.

The concept, conceived by Thomas Grundner, an assistant professor at Case Western’s Department of Family Medicine, was meant to offer answers to simple questions that the public had about their health. It was not meant to replace a hospital, of course, but it was a useful resource for someone who needed general medical information at a moment’s notice. All they needed to do was dial up the bulletin board.

According to the Akron Beacon Journal, Grundner had the idea after some members of the public caught wind of the medical school’s internal computer communications system in the 1970s, in hopes of finding necessary medical information on the fly.

“ he phone number to it got into the public domain and lay people started calling up and would leave medically related questions on that system in hopes that a physician would answer,” Grundner told the newspaper.

That said, the system would only go so far in offering medical information.

“We can’t do any diagnosing, and we can’t deal with anyone’s specific case,” Grundner told InfoWorld in 1985. “We talk about the issues they’re raising.”

The experimental concept soon found a calling far beyond medicine. St. Silicon’s Hospital became the template for the world’s first general-information Free-Net, which came out of Cleveland in 1986, complete with support both from Mayor Voinovich and Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste.

Grundner was closely involved in the creation of the Cleveland Free-Net, helping to organize public and financial support for his endeavor from other parts of Cleveland’s “boom” era, like Ohio Bell.

The system, notably, had the support of AT&T, which helped supply the computer equipment used to run the multi-line system. Case Western also was quick to show its public support.

This was a notable outcome, as it isn’t always a guarantee when a university creates an important piece of technology that the school will publicly support it.

And with the wide support from so many broad entities, encompassing the worlds of business, education, and government, the project quickly proved to be a major success, giving the public access to both information and ways to communicate whenever they wanted.

Corporate America helped provide the hardware; professionals in a variety of fields, from doctors to lawyers to car mechanics, provided much of the early content; and Case Western helped fund the new version of Cleveland that came to life on its campus.

And over time, there were even upgrades. In 1989, Case Western launched an upgrade for the system, working on an IBM machine that could handle as many as 34 users at once. This was a big deal—and use of the Cleveland Free-Net soon surged.

Clearly, this was an idea bigger than Cleveland.

An example of what the Cleveland Free-Net looked like on a terminal screen. (via rtfm.vtt.net)

How the Free-Net movement grew globally—and then slowly faded away

The Free-Net concept was many things, but one thing it was not was graphical.

This, in the end, likely played a factor in its decline. Commercial networks were flashy, or fast. Free-Nets were stuck on pokey dial-up modems at a time when faster options like cable internet or DSL were starting to gain steam.

While the bulletin board systems and text-based internet connections of the early 1990s held much potential for digital pioneers, the problem was, not everyone was a pioneer—and municipal networks targeted at small communities naturally wouldn’t stand out compared to commercial services.

Grundner, in a 1993 speech at the University of Illinois titled Seizing the Infosphere: An Alternative Vision for National Computer Networking, suggested that the Free-Net concept was intended as a happy medium between expensive commercial services like CompuServe and ramshackle hobbyist services like a BBS.

“What we’re trying to do here is to occupy a new middle ground between those two extremes,” he explained.

The problem is, this calculus made more sense before the World Wide Web became prominent. The technology made it so that it didn’t really matter so much anymore how you connected to the internet, as long as you were able to get online at a speedy rate and using a graphical interface. At the time he gave this speech, AOL had yet to become dominant and a GUI-friendly version of the World Wide Web was just gaining its bearings at the University of Illinois.

This created a clear dichotomy—while Free-Nets offered free internet, it was not the version of the internet people were talking about, the one with the web. As the Akron Beacon Journal characterized the issue in a 1997 article on computers at libraries: “Another problem is that because these terminals are often purchased with precious public funds, they are usually not the high-speed, up-top-the-minute technological wonders needed to take advantage of the latest developments on the internet.”

Given that context, it’s understandable that NPTN declared bankruptcy and folded around 1996.

(Grundner also ran into personal problems around this time, and in 1997 was convicted of possessing child pornography in a federal court; he revealed to a judge that he had developed an addiction to online pornography. While he avoided time in prison after the judge reviewed a psychiatric report that found he was not a danger to the public, he served house arrest and probation instead. He afterwards became an anti-pornography advocate and left the world of technology.)

A number of regional Free-Nets would shut down not long after the nonprofit that helped bring them online did the same. The groups were already nonprofits by nature, working with limited budgets and getting by on a small number of volunteers or employees, and it would simply prove difficult to compete with a commercial ISP that could keep up with growing bandwidth needs by consumers, while maintaining all the other things that make nonprofits tick—like figuring out where new funding is going to come from.

It was a recipe for obsolescence, one that befell many services that relied on dial-up terminal interfaces.

On its website, for example, the Finland Free-Net offered some particularly stark commentary that spoke to this point, according to a website translation from Finnish:

Eight years ago, Free-Net launched pioneering operations in Finland for extensive electronic service for all citizens. Through the Free-Net service, especially the schoolchildren gained first contact with the world of computer networks. Cooperation has been uncomplicated and smooth.

However, everything has its time. We had to give up our email services on September 30, 2001. Public funding of Free-Net declined year after year and it was impossible to continue.

With only a handful of exceptions, you’ll find that most of the Free-Net providers from the 1980s and 1990s suffered the same fate, dying out around the turn of the 21st century.

A recreation of the Cleveland Free-Net login screen at cfn.tangledhelix.com. The login screen was notable for its inclusion of the Cleveland skyline.

Even the Cleveland Free-Net, which is replicated on this website, faded from view in 1999, having failed to find a way to sustain the service beyond donations; while it made some money from licensing out the bulletin-board software the university had built, it was far less than the overall cost of running the service itself.

“The Cleveland Free-Net, a remarkable achievement for its time, has been made obsolete by new technologies,” the Free-Net explained in a digital notice.

(Grundner’s former colleagues at Case Western were careful to emphasize that its inventor’s criminal conviction had no effect on the decision to end the service.)

The services that did stick around, with few exceptions, have moved away from offering community internet for free. Instead, they became closer to libraries in their conceit—offering services, rather than networks, to the community.

These networks, designed for an era of tinny dial-up modems and intended to bring the benefits of networked computing outside of academia, were built with local communities in mind. But the local communities saw a shiny object and looked the other way.