Chapter 3 · 1994–1995

The text years

Numbered menus on a server two hours away, never enough modems, and a town square that had to make up its rules as it went.

• 4,584Users, July 1994
• 6,412Users, December 1994
• ~9,000Users, April 1995
• 56,788Log-ins in March 1995

Never enough lines

ORION opened with 15 modems, and they were full every evening from the first week. In August 1994 the board spent about $18,000 on a 16-port communications server, more modem cards, two 486 PCs and a printer.¹ Nine more modems came online in November, and nine more in February 1995, along with a fractional T1 over the library's line.^3, 5 It still wasn't enough. On February 25, 1995 only 29 public modems were working. By April there were 44 modems and room for 56 people at once, counting those who came in over the Internet, all sharing 384K of bandwidth.⁷

Disk space was just as tight. The server in Columbia couldn't hold everyone's mail, so mail retention was cut to five days in February 1995, then four. If you didn't log in for most of a week, your mail was gone.^5, 7

"Tharp reported the modem pool has been dialing 911."

The minutes don't say how a bank of modems ended up calling 911, only that Tharp would make sure it stopped.

The first spam

On Sunday night, August 7, 1994, a company called Advanced Learning Corp. used an America Online account to send an unsolicited ad to about 3,000 of ORION's 4,500 users. The system slowed to a crawl overnight and crashed around 8:30 Monday morning. Up to twelve hours of mail may have been lost.

MOREnet's Jim Newton complained to AOL, which closed the account and apologized. On ORION's own newsgroup, users proposed flooding the company with mail in return. Tharp talked them out of it: the bounces would have landed on ORION.²

The same month, ten accounts were disabled after break-in attempts.¹ The Internet's problems had found Springfield within four months.

Rules for the public square

ORION's discussion groups were the closest thing Springfield had to an online town hall, and the board had to decide what that meant. In September 1994 it set up an "Issues" area with an unmoderated newsgroup and online votes. A new newsgroup needed a petition and a two-thirds vote of users, and anonymous groups weren't allowed.⁴ Over the following months came a Kids Area, a Swap Meet, orion.talk.politics, and orion.questions.³

In January 1995 a user complained about obscene posts. The board formed a complaints committee and gave the coordinator the power to suspend accounts.⁶ That February, ORION opened a forum on a proposed quarter-cent city sales tax, one of the earliest examples of local civic debate happening online.⁹ In May, after a library board discussion and a two-thirds user vote, a religion newsgroup opened under orion.talk. It drew more than 700 posts in six weeks.⁸

The users talk back

In September 1994 a user was annoyed that his posts to a moderated newsgroup took three hours to appear, and said so on the general newsgroup. Other regulars added their own complaints and suggestions, and two of them took the list to the ORION board. Linnemeyer, then the board's chair, suggested they organize and send someone to board meetings.

They did. The group held its first meeting on September 10, 1994, at the Village Inn South, with Rich Tatum as its first elected president. It went from "The Users' Group" to "The ORION Users' Group" and, once commercial providers arrived, the Ozarks Internet Users' Group. Its members wrote beginner guides for ORION that later ran on the group's own web pages.¹⁰

Santa@ozarks

For Christmas 1994 ORION gave Santa an address: santa@ozarks.sgcl.lib.mo.us. Tharp played Santa's "cyber-elf." Each letter got an automatic reply and then a personal one, 97 letters in all. The board called it one of the most rewarding things ORION had done.^11, 6

A year in

ORION celebrated its first anniversary in April 1995 with almost 9,000 users. A News-Leader feature that week found a blind Ozark High student reading mailing lists with speech software, a radio talk host doing his show prep on it before dawn, and an Evangel student chatting with friends out of state for the price of a local call. Tharp said local information, not Internet access, would decide whether ORION succeeded. In a few years, he expected, Internet access would be everywhere.⁷

Volunteers formed Friends of ORION to raise money, and the board talked about selling vanity userids, like license plates. A grant bought a second server, meant to put ORION on the World Wide Web.¹²

Then the ground moved. In March 1995 MOREnet announced it was moving away from FreePort toward the Web.⁶ The numbered menus had about four months left.