🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <blhqdp$pgg$2@eeyore.INS.cwru.edu>,
Richard F. Drushel <rfd@po.cwru.edu> wrote:
>        Of course Freenet 2003 wouldn't be a text-based BBS!  It should have
>begun evolving away from that in 1995, been on the cutting edge of trying to
>find an efficient pointy-clicky interface.

Parts of it did, starting in 1992 or so.

Mike Kukura and I discussed ways of building a pointy-clicky interface
to Free-Net.  We talked about designing a protocol for it.

Then Gopher came out.  The similarities were obvious.  I proposed
converting Free-Net to Gopher, and even had a student employee develop
an automated Free-Net to Gopher menu translator as a proof of concept.
I don't remember how, exactly we did it, but we did move the CWRUnet
portions of Free-Net over to Gopher, and soon thereafter, to the WWW.

Eventually that evolved into the campus web services we have today,
including Blackboard.  I didn't have a hand in that evolution, however.

I don't think that turning CFN into AOL would have been a smart move.

By the way, *I* think that the biggest factor in killing Free-Net's
community feel was its change of mission into being a free Internet
access point.  After that happened, the majority of dial-in users
used CFN to get out into Internet resources, not to participate in local
discussions, and many of the Internet users were doing the same!
(There was an art, for a while, of chaining from one dumb-terminal
Internet service to another until you could get to whatever you really
wanted to access.)

It was pretty obvious, by the time CFN died, that technology had left
it behind.  I thought a bit about how to recreate the Cleveland-centered
SIGs on the web, then discarded the idea.  Some of what the cyberpunk
authors write is true -- global networking enables us to form communities
with anyone, anywhere.  Geography has lost its relevance to online
communities.

         Stephen

-- 
Stephen Trier
Technical Development Lab
Cleveland FES Center
sct@po.cwru.edu