History of the Los Angeles Free-Net
by Avrum Bluming, M.D.
In 1984, the Department of Family Medicine at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, Ohio had house staff officers at five
clinical units around the city. In order for these physicians to
communicate with each other without playing telephone tag,
an old Apple II microcomputer was connected to a phone line, and a
computerized bulletin board was set up by Tom Grundner, Ed.D. The system
had both email capability and a general announcement area. Any faculty
or staff member with access to a microcomputer and a modem could use the
system to receive and send messages 24 hours a day.
Not long after the system was inaugurated, a hacker in Cleveland found
the system and, because Doctors reviewed the announcements several times
a day, decided to leave a medical question on the system. One of the
physicians posted an answer to the question. The availability of
anonymously asked, professionally answered, free medical information,
provided in a timely fashion, proved immensely popular in the Cleveland
area. Dr. Grundner rewrote the software to provide a friendly interface
to the general public, recruited physicians to answer the incoming
questions and nicknamed the system "St. Silicon's Hospital and Information
Dispensary." He and a colleague, Dr. Robert Garrett, described the
evolving system in a New England Journal of Medicine article entitled:
Interactive Medical Telecomputing: An alternative approach to community
health education. (New England Journal of Medicine 1986;314:982-5). At
the conclusion of the article, the authors offered to distribute the
software created to run this system to qualified parties on a
collaborative basis. Avrum Bluming, M.D., a Los Angeles cancer
specialist, recognizing the life-saving value of medical information
provided when it was needed, contacted Dr. Grundner in 1986, and offered
to help set up a collaborative system in Los Angeles. He was informed that
the system was much more than a medical information resource, that it had,
in fact, grown into an electronic city renamed the Cleveland Free-Net,
and had a post office, a library, a school house, a government center, and
an administration center in addition to St. Silicon's Hospital. Since the
system could not be distributed in modules, Dr. Bluming was informed that
a system in Los Angeles would have to have the full range of services
provided by the Cleveland Free-Net. It took nine years and a core of
dedicated, multitalented people to turn the concept of a Los Angeles
Free-Net into a real world system. Linda Delzeit, an Orange County
educator, Richard Bisbey, a computer scientist, Phil Mittelman,
a physicist and retired entrepreneur, and Mel Roseman, a retired teacher
helped lead the hundreds of volunteers whose efforts have generated a
thriving Los Angeles Free-Net which was finally born on May 10, 1994. Our
home system housed at the Tarzana Regional Medical Center has grown from a
text based service on a Sun Sparc10 with 16 dial up phone lines and a
single 56KB link to the Internet into a WWW site with extensive community
resources, many modular servers, hundreds of dial up phone lines with T1
links to the Internet and frame relay sites providing toll free access to
the Los Angeles Free-net from most locations within the greater Los
Angeles area. The lessons learned from this experiment in community-based
telecommunications were summarized in an article by Avrum Bluming, M.D.
and Phillip Mittelman, Ph.D. in an article entitled: Los Angeles Free-Net:
an experiment in interactive telecommunication between lay members of the
Los Angeles community and health care experts.
(Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 1996;84:217-22).
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Last Updated 9/1/97.