FirstClass is an email, online conferencing, and bulletin-board system for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. E-mail, or email, is short for electronic mail and is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. ... Web conferencing is used to hold group meetings or live presentations over the Internet. ... A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, playing games, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users. ... Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft. ... Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh line of computer systems. ... Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ...

FirstClass originally gained a following in the bulletin-board market, primarily on the Mac, due to its Mac-like GUI-based interface. By the mid-1990s the product was used for the vast majority of Mac BBSes, and their popularity only increased with the introduction of a Microsoft Windows client. In particular, Magic BBS became particularly well known, visited by Mac users from around the world. Many systems were linked together by OneNet, a self-organized worldwide network of FC BBS systems, similar to FidoNet in concept. GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... OneNet is a network of bulletin board systems (BBSs) where message forums (known as conferences) were replicated across FirstClass systems. ... The FidoNet logo FidoNet is an inter-connecting file and message transport system that was used by bulletin board systems (BBS). ...

In the mid-1990s the BBS market started to die off with the rapid introduction of the internet, and FirstClass was re-aligned as a corporate e-mail solution. Although successful to some degree, a combination of the declining Macintosh market share and little visibility in the PC market meant it was unable to compete with major vendors such as Microsoft or Lotus. The product slowly devolved into a niche player, primarily in the education market. Today it is owned by Open Text. The Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual sales of US$44. ... Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) is an American software company with its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... Open Text Corporation is a Canadian high-tech company based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. ...

Early history

FirstClass is originally a product of SoftArc, formed by three former members of Bell Northern Research, Nortel's research arm located in downtown Toronto. The team, consisting of two brothers and a friend, had been the primary developers of the successful Meridian Mail system, and styled themselves as the Toronto Ideas Group. After a run-in with management, the three were fired and formed SoftArc as a consulting firm. Bell-Northern Research (BNR) was one of the worlds premier research and development organizations in telecommunications. ... Northern Telecommunications Networks, commonly known as Nortel, is a telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Canada. ... Meridian Mail was one of the earliest all-digital voicemail systems, running on Northern Telecoms (now Nortel) Meridian digital PBX systems. ...

FirstClass was created in response to a request by a family friend who worked at the Scarborough Board of Education (now part of the Toronto District School Board). He asked them to find a reasonable Macintosh-based e-mail system that offered both LAN and modem support, a real GUI, and supported both private e-mail as well as public discussion areas (forums). BBSes offered modem support and public forums, but typically had no LAN support and were character-based. Various LAN e-mail systems existed, those on the Mac with reasonable GUI's, but they tended to have poor modem support and few offered forums. Lan can stand for several things: A local area network Lan (airline) formerly LanChile Lan Peru Län, a kind of administrative division used in Sweden Lan Mandragoran, a fictional character in the Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan. ... A modem (a portmanteau constructed from modulate and demodulate) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ...

The team found only one product, TeleFinder, which came close to filling the requirements. However they were unimpressed with its solution for LAN access, which consisted of a system extension that redirected AppleTalk data into a sort of virtual modem port. Additionally they felt they could improve on the GUI. Although they said they would be happy to set up a TeleFinder system under contract, they also offered to write a new product that was even better. The proposal was accepted, and work on EduNet started some time in 1989. TeleFinder is a Macintosh-based bulletin-board system, based on a client-server model whos client end provides a Mac-like GUI. It appears to be the first such system on any platform, predating Apples own AppleLink, as well as other Mac-based BBS systems like FirstClass. ... Extension (Mac OS) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... AppleTalk is a suite of protocols developed by Apple Computer for computer networking. ...

As the product started to gel it became clear that they had a superior BBS system in the making. After renaming it to the more generic FirstClass, they started demonstrating early versions to Toronto-area Mac BBSes. They were stunned by the poor reception they received; sysops complained about missing features while the overall concept — a BBS with a true Mac-like GUI — was overlooked.

The BBS revolution

Things started to change when an Apple Canada employee, Mark Windrim, set up a FirstClass BBS largely as an experiment. Word of the new system quickly spread through the small Toronto Mac online community, but getting onto the system proved challenging. To successfully download Mac software required the support of MacBinary, a protocol that FirstClass did not initially support. Prospective users first had to find the client program on another BBS, which were usually DOS-based and didn't normally carry Mac software. Even with this barrier to entry, local Mac users heard of the system and established accounts. Due to the Mac OS forked file structure, transferring Mac OS files to non-Macintosh computers is problematic. ... ‹ The template below has been proposed for deletion. ...

One FirstClass feature made the system particularly popular. The server was multithreaded, and the client added a thread for every window. This meant that the user could open multiple messages at the same time, while uploading and downloading in the background. Whereas most systems indirectly encouraged users to simply "leech" files and then leave, users waiting for downloads on FirstClass had an entire modem channel free for uploading or writing. And write they did; generally the average user posted about three times as many messages as on traditional command-line based systems. Even with a single phone line and a tiny user base, the system soon had message volumes approaching that of major commercial services such as Canada Remote Systems and even entire networks such as FidoNet. The GUI also offered access to users who would normally never call a BBS system; the user base was about half women in a time where 5% might be more common, and represented a wide range of users and ages. Canada Remote Systems, or simply CRS, was a major commercial bulletin board system located in the Toronto area. ...

Basic FirstClass "desktop", circa 1993, in this case for the Great Lakes Free-Net. Note the red flags beside some of the folders, indicating new mail. Systems would normally be customized, including background graphics and custom folder icons.

Mac users began bypassing local systems and calling long distance to use what was then the only really Mac-like BBS out there. This wasn't lost on other BBS system operators, who turned to SoftArc's "BBS Special" to set up their own systems. Between 1991 and 1993 practically every Mac BBS system moved to FirstClass. Other FirstClass BBS systems that mushroomed to thousands of users included the Virginia-based DigitalNation, which hoped become an AOL competitor, the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group's Planet BMUG and the LiveWire and Virtual Valley services operated by Silicon Valley's Metro Newspapers group. Image File history File links FirstClass_GLFN_desktop. ... Image File history File links FirstClass_GLFN_desktop. ...

Following the basic premises outlined by Guy Kawasaki in his book, The Macintosh Way, SoftArc used the buzz generated by the BBS market and the associated user groups to help evangelize the product into companies, where it was used as an e-mail platform. At the end of this period sales were generally 1/3rd BBS systems, 1/3rd educational sites, and 1/3rd internal e-mail systems. Licensing for commercial use was higher priced, and generated most of the company's income. Training also grew to become a major source of income during this period. Guy Kawasaki (born 1954) was one of the original Apple Computer employees responsible for marketing of the Macintosh in 1984. ...

The good times didn't last. By 1994 the internet was becoming a major force, killing off almost all BBS systems on both the Mac and PC over the next year or so. Most BBS vendors went bankrupt during this period, but SoftArc's sales into the Mac e-mail market remained strong through this period and allowed them to weather what was becoming a "crash" essentially untouched.

Corporate e-mail

By this point SoftArc had grown into a major Mac software vendor, and had released clients for both the Mac and Microsoft Windows in a variety of (human) languages. The system had matured to become considerably more powerful than other e-mail systems of the era, notably QuickMail or Microsoft Mail on the Mac, and similar offerings on the PC. A PC server on Windows NT soon followed. Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft. ... QuickMail was a LAN based email system developed by CE Software in the 1980s through 2003. ... Microsoft Mail is a file-based E-mail system intended for corporate usage. ... Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. ...

In the mid-1990s the "next big thing" in the e-mail market seemed to be groupware, essentially renamed LAN-based BBS systems. FirstClass was ideally suited for this new market. However there were a number of problems that limited its appeal in this role. The server could be run only on a single machine, limiting its expandability. Although a store-and-forward linking was built-in, user accounts and other information remained associated with a single server, forcing users to always log into "their" server. Additionally the look of the system was also becoming more idiosyncratic; the layout and visual polish were designed to be cross platform rather than look "native" to the client platform, and by the mid-90s the system was starting to look extremely dated. Collaborative software, also known as groupware, is application software that integrates work on a single project by several concurrent users at separated workstations (see also Computer supported cooperative work). ...

At the same time, a battle between Lotus Notes and the new Microsoft Outlook was just starting. In order to compete with these products on a technical level, FirstClass had to add internet functionality and some sort of scripting language for automating workflows, perhaps the most-demanded feature of Notes. Both projects dragged on. By the time they were really ready for widespread use, the massive marketing machinery of Lotus and Microsoft had swung into action on the PC side, and the Mac market was essentially disappearing as Apple floundered. Lotus Notes is a client-server collaborative software and e-mail system owned by Lotus Software, of the IBM Software Group. ... Screenshot of Outlook 2003 Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. ... Scripting languages (commonly called scripting programming languages or script languages) are computer programming languages created to shorten the traditional edit-compile-link-run process. ...

Another technically interesting addition to FirstClass during this period was a voicemail solution (coded by James MacLean) integrated with the server. This allows users to receive voice, fax and e-mail in their single mailbox, which could be accessed using the client, the web interface, or even an interactive voice response system. Technically the system was quite advanced, but it appears sales were not greatly improved with its introduction. In telephony, interactive voice response, or IVR, is a computerized system that allows a person, typically a telephone caller, to select an option from a voice menu and otherwise interface with a computer system. ...

By 1997 the company was in financial difficulty, and arranged a "reverse takover" with a small company from Vancouver to become listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange as Centrinity. Their main sales appear to have remained in the education system, notably some extremely large installations in Las Vegas. Vancouver (pronounced: ) is a Canadian city in the province of British Columbia. ... The Toronto Stock Exchange (also known as the TSX) is Canadas largest stock exchange, North Americas third largest stock exchange, and the sixth largest in the world. ... This article is about the city of Las Vegas in Nevada. ...

In September 2002 Open Text bought Centrinity, for a grand total of about $19CAD million, a tiny fraction of its value during the heyday in mid-90s. Open Text was developing a suite of online collaboration products through a series of mergers, and FirstClass's strong educational background fit in particularly well with some of their other offerings. At the time they stated they were planning to integrate FirstClass into their LiveLink internet information collection engine, but it is unclear if this integration has taken place. The product is still under development in what is now their FirstClass division.

It is interesting to note that two of the original server developers (Steve Asbury, and Paul Whittemore) are still with the company and actively involved with the coding of the product. In addition, two of the original client developers (Jon Asbury, and Ron Pasdernick) are also still with the company. Many people have credited the products evolution to the fact these four key developers are still involved with the product. Also worth nothing is that Jeff Parker (Director of Application Development) has been with the company many many years. Jeff is regarded as an ass by some, and very stern but he has held an integral role in making the company what it is today.

External links

• SoftArc — redirects to the Open Text FirstClass home page
• FirstClass and Supporting Hardware — shows a number of images from a standard FC system. Part of a series of systems being used to run Free-Net systems.
• MacMagic — one user's attempt to re-form MAGIC
• Citadel — another email and groupware server that is derived from BBS roots, but this one is open source and is native to Linux and Unix.
• FirstClassTalk — just started Sept 10, 2006 - FirstClass Community Support
• Download the FirstClass Client — Available for Windows, Mac and Linux
• (a link to an ESTABLISHED site of community of users for shared tech support would be nice here!)