Short history of CCL -- It is still being written

1991	CCL is born	E-mail Listserver and FTP archives for computational chemists is established at OSC as a hobby project of Jan Labanowski.
1994	CCL gets Gopher	CCL Introduces Gopher interface to messages and its FTP site. CCL grows in number of subscribers and messages.
1995	CCL gets WEB	CCL Introduces WEB interface to messages and its FTP site.
1996	CCL gets money from NSF	After your help with support letters, CCL got a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
1996	CCL gets domain	Just in case, Jan Labanowski personally registers the domain ccl.net since the good domains are being bought by the millions by domain name investors.
1996	CCL buys small iron	After deliberations and all the advice not to (...buy something solid if you have money...) CCL decided to operate from PCs running Linux and Apache Web Server.
1996	CCL hires Dave	CCL hired Dave Tinapple who designs a new logo and basic layout of CCL on the new hardware.
1999	Students take over	Dave with his valuable experience chooses other opportunities; CCL maintenance and development is continued by students.
1999	On our own wire	The development of new CCL is completed. The CCL traffic starts to interfere with OSC traffic on the OSC Web Server. CCL moves to its own subnet on a separate router feed, and starts operation from PCs in a distributed fashion.
1999	OSC takes the tab	The NSF grant is over, and OSC is supporting CCL again. The consensus on the ways how CCL can be supported in the future is achieved.
2000	CCL needs your money	CCL starts its sponsorchip drive, so it can assure that it is a valuable and sustainable resource

Created by Jan Labanowski, in January, 1991, the Computational Chemistry List (CCL) enjoyed the support and encouragement of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). 

The discussion forum became busier and larger every year and has become a big success!!!. There is, however, a typical story to every success. 

CCL activity grew too large for a single person to manage as an after-hours love affair.  Moreover, CCL consumed more than 90% of the Web and ftp traffic of the parent organization, the Ohio Supercomputer Center -- this is a lot... From a few Megabytes of files it grew to Gigabytes. In short, it became too big to be managed as a hobby, and it consumed resources which are quite expensive.  Moreover, we planned major additions to the CCL, hence running the project off an OSC Web Server and pretending that we were small would not work for long. 

We had to move CCL over to a separate network and link from our upstream provider. 

In 1996, the CCL was blessed with the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.  Reviewers considered the CCL a much needed and successful resource, and suggested that the Seed Grant from NSF be used to develop an environment which could be self-sustaining in the future.  Thus the grant was able to provide the necessary funds to employ students, buy hardware and software, and to put a lot of effort in the overal design and tools for managing the resource. 

Today, the CCL has thousands of subscribers and continues and its Web traffic continues to grow..

Our Mission

The Computational Chemistry List (CCL) is dedicated to fostering communication within the world-wide community of researchers involved in chemistry-focused computation.

To achieve this ambitious goal, CCL has, from its birth in January 1991, provided an electronic forum for computational chemists to:

• find approaches to solving their current problems
• share their experience
• discuss the latest software
• find jobs
• learn about workshops and conferences
• share software and utilities

Within the past few years, driven by user needs and only made possible by increases in funding, CCL has expanded its original mission to include providing users with a repository of computational chemistry research aids.

To this end, a website was created to house these archives which range from documents that explain a particular area of computational chemistry to free software tools.

You -- Our Diverse Audience, Our Strength

Today's scientific environment -- problems, solutions, tools, funding -- is becoming increasingly more complex. CCL recognizes this and believes that the most productive discussion is generated by a diversity of perspectives.

Consequently, from its inception, CCL has always kept its discussion open to the general public.

This academic perspective has allowed it to fulfill needs left otherwise unmet, e.g. a place for daily cross-fertilization of ideas between academic and industrial researchers around the world.

At the beginning of summer 2000, 40% of CCL's subscribers are in the U.S. with the remaining 60% in over 50 other countries on all continents. CCL's subscribers are from a diversity of workplaces: educational(50%), commercial(36%), government(5.5%), military (2%), non-profit(1.5%) with the remainder being ISP providers.

The only restriction is that discussion be legitimately focused on the topic of computational chemistry; however, any level of discussion is allowed, from begginning through advanced. Consequently, CCL is also serving an important edicational role. Moreover, the CCL is maintained, and developed by students. Many students worked for CCL and gained invaluable experience of system and network administration, hardware maintainance, computer security (we are behind our own firewall), WEB development, programming, content acquisition, public relations, etc. Some "graduates" of CCL earn now more money than CCL founder, since their hands-on experience is very sought after.

And, unique to CCL, anyone -- not just subscribers -- may post a message. This is similiar to the policy used by Usenet news groups; however, unlike most news groups, CCL is practically spam-free due to many innovative approaches which were developed from the scratch for CCL.

As such, CCL -- with a minimal noise-level and cost-free to the subscriber -- taps into the vast experience and collective knowledge of the entire world of computational chemists.