| 1991 | CCL is born | E-mail Listserver and FTP archives for computational chemists are 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 (check our audience composition) and its Web traffic continues to grow. To keep e-mail traffic in check, we decided to introduce and enforce rules by sophisticated filters and tools. We place certain announcements only on our Web site and we discourage messages which are not of general interest. Please review also our mission statement to learn more about our reson d'etre.