First Class - The BBS Era

The BBS Era

After renaming the product to the more generic FirstClass, they started demonstrating early versions to Toronto-area Mac BBSes.

An Apple Canada employee, Mark Windrim, set up a FirstClass BBS in Toronto called MAGIC (the Macintosh Awareness Group in Canada). Local Mac users heard of the system and established accounts, quickly turning it into the largest Mac-oriented BBS system in the area. Having started with a single phone line and a tiny user base, MAGIC became a commercial entity called "Magic", eventually reached 6,000 users, and had 48 phone lines.

Due to the multithreaded nature of the FirstClass client software, 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.

SoftArc sought to take advantage of the growing interest by offering reduced prices to BBS operators. During this time, some FirstClass BBS systems mushroomed to thousands of users, including the Virginia-based DigitalNation, which had hoped to become an AOL competitor, the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group's Planet BMUG, as well as BendNet BBS in Bend, Oregon and Virtual Valley services operated by Silicon Valley's Metro Newspapers group.

The FirstClass software later incorporated a feature that allowed individual FirstClass sites to 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 internet connections. Apple employee Scott Converse formed the first and probably the most extensive network of FirstClass based sites in the world known as OneNet.

By 1994 the internet was becoming a major force, obsoleting most BBS systems on both Mac and Windows over the next year or so.