FirstClass
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FirstClass is an email, online conferencing, and bulletin-board system for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
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.
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.
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[edit] 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.
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.
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.
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.
[edit] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[edit] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[edit] 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!)
