FirstClass
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FirstClass is a client/server email, online conferencing, and bulletin-board system for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux based on a modular client/server architecture.
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 developed several strong niches, primarily in the education market. Today it is owned by Open Text, and has a licensed userbase of about 10 million users.
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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] FCP
Key to FirstClass's operation was the underlying FCP (FirstClass Protocol). FCP was a file transfer protocol that implemented a transport layer that all FirstClass communications used. This guaranteed error-free communications for all activities, not just file transfers. FCP could run on several different physical layers, not just modems, but AppleTalk networking while later versions added Novell's IPX and TCP/IP as well. Both the client and server could communicate over either of these links, allowing a user to seamlessly move from office to home and have access to the same server. This appears to be unique to this day, most e-mail systems are dedicated to network access while most BBS systems supported only modems. Solutions were available to allow networking to be forwarded over modems, but these were generally less efficient and often difficult to set up.
FCP was based on a sliding window protocol, which was not uncommon among better protocols of the era. FCP offered many more features, however. In addition to supporting a wide variety of packet sizes tuned to different networking protocols, later versions of FCP could turn off their own error correction systems when running over error-free links like TCP/IP. FCP also implemented an encryption system based the on Blowfish cipher. With all of these features turned off, FCP still offered good performance even on the slow modems common in the era it being written in (2400 bps being most common).
Additionally, every FCP packet included a "task number" identifier, similar to the port identifier in TCP/IP. This allowed FCP to construct a number of "virtual links" between each client and server. This was the key to FirstClass's popularity; the server implemented a multithreaded kernel and opened a new thread for every task requested by a client. Clients could continue to "operate" the system even with communications already set up. The user could upload and download files at the same time, while simultaneously reading and writing mail. No operation in the client blocked the user, with the exception of the OS-supplied modal dialogs.
[edit] The BBS revolution
Fortunes started to change when an Apple Canada employee, Mark Windrim, set up a FirstClass BBS largely as an experiment known as Magic. 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. Equally strong communities formed around the other early-adopter systems.
The FirstClass software also incorporated a feature that allowed individual FirstClass sites to gateway (share) conference content and private mail by allowing the servers to link together. Originally this was accomplished via dialup connections but eventually allowed sites to link via the internet using tcp/ip connections. Apple employee, Scott Converse formed the first and probably the most extensive network of FirstClass based sites in the world known as OneNet. Even today (2007) OneNet exists albeit in a much smaller form than in its hayday.
Due to the multithreaded nature of the system, 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, Magic 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 and Collaboration
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 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, arguably the primary feature that made Notes popular. By the time they were ready for widespread use, the massive marketing machinery of Lotus and Microsoft had swung into action on the PC side, and simultaneously the Mac market was essentially disappearing as Apple floundered through the mid to late 1990s.
Another technically interesting addition to FirstClass during this period was a voice mail solution 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 arranged a "reverse takover" by a 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, Primarily for the Clark County School District, who issues all their employees and a large portion of their students FirstClass accounts.
In September 2002 Open Text bought Centrinity, for a reported $19 million CDN. 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 this integration was not practical due to the architecture of LiveLink.
The product is still under development in what is now the FirstClass Division of Open Text, has over 10 million users and runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux platforms. The latest version, 8.3, was released in 2006 and positioned as an "Integrated set of Network Applications", including 10 integrated groupware applications.
[edit] External links
- Official website
- 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.
