[SamAdams76]

I remember getting a phone call from Jim Robinson at around this time in 1997. We were then posting together on the Prodigy Whitewater BB back in the early days of the Internet. We used to post newspaper and magazine articles in their entirety. But Prodigy (owned by Sears) began pulling down posts that were copyrighted news articles. Free Republic was to be a "fair use" website where we could post articles in their entirety.

Most of us know the rest of the story. Eventually Free Republic had to obey the copyrights and only excerpt articles where the original sources had an issue with it. Still, we are able to post many articles in it's entirety here. And as for those that we have to excerpt, we Freepers have become famous for "not reading the article" and posting replies based on the headline or excerpt only!

I signed up for Free Republic on the very first day under my actual real life name. A bit later, I decided to change my name to SamAdams76 and so that is why my sign up date is Dec 9 1997 and not the very day Free Republic went online.

[Oscar in Batangas]

Thanks for that great bit of FR history!!!

[Yaelle]

Wow, I did not know that about your history! I’m even more impressed with you than I was an hour ago. ;)

[Jim Robinson]

Been awhile since *P. Time flies when you’re having fun.

[cpdiii]

I go back to the Whitewater BB postings. When Jim Rob founded Free Republic I lurked for a while and then signed up. My official sign up date is March 2000 but is actually about a year earlier. I changed my handle to cpdiii as my former handle keep getting confused with another Freeper with a similar handle.

Thank you Jim Rob for what you have given us.