Grex

» see grex.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 1991 a free Unix account meant a local phone call. That is the whole reason a system like Grex is a Michigan story rather than a global one: the modems were in Ann Arbor, and long distance was priced to make sure you only dialed what was near you. Later the internet made the phone number optional, but the culture had already set by then, and it was the culture of one college town.

Grex started as a breakaway. Ann Arbor already had M-Net, and M-Net had an owner, Dave Parks, whose threatened shutdowns and unilateral policy calls made a certain kind of user nervous about building a life on someone else's machine. A dozen of them started meeting weekly. They kept meeting for six months, designing a system that would be owned by its members and run on slow group decision-making, which is a deliberately unfashionable thing to choose. Before launching they held a picnic at Island Park under the name Friends of Grex, partly to practice making decisions as a group. Twelve people are named as founders, among them Valerie Mates and Marcus Watts.

What they incorporated was Cyberspace Communications, Inc., a Michigan non-profit with 501(c)(3) status and an elected board of directors. A shell account cost nothing. Dues were two dollars a month, or eighteen a year, and what the money bought was a vote and the right to stand for the board. That is an unusual way to price an internet service, and it tells you what the founders thought they were building.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the dial-in years ~

For its first thirteen years Grex ran on second-hand Sun machines under Sun's own Unix, which is the hardware budget of an organization funded entirely by two-dollar dues and donated labor. It later moved to a nearly stock OpenBSD. Telnet survived until October 2011, when it was finally dropped for SSH, about fifteen years after the rest of the world had made that call.

The actual product was conferencing. Over a hundred public forums, threaded, with the kind of long-running arguments that only happen when the same few hundred people read each other for a decade. At its busiest the system was taking roughly two hundred new accounts a day and carrying about twenty nine thousand of them.

~ the lawsuit ~

Cyberspace Communications turns up in the case law because of Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999, the state's own Child Online Protection Act. Grex was a plaintiff in the challenge against it, which is how a volunteer-run shell server in Ann Arbor ended up filing declarations about how many of its users were minors and why it did not check anyone's age. A system that hands out free accounts to strangers has an obvious problem with a law like that, and the organization said so in court rather than quietly changing its signup form.

~ the inheritance ~

The notice was four sentences and ended with "See ya." The Grex system would be permanently shut down and cease operation on 15 April 2023, due to lack of staff support and other reasons. Thirty two years, closed by nobody being left to run it.

grex.org still answers today, labeled a legacy site, which is more dignity than most of this graveyard gets. The shell accounts are gone and the conferences are gone, but a former user set up a Facebook group, which is a bleak place for the survivors of a free-speech public access Unix co-operative to end up. I was never going to be one of them. I got online in 1998 in Turkey, on a 33.6k modem and a phone line billed by the minute, and the free Unix shell in Michigan was free the way a public library in another country is free.

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