Great initiative and idea! While I am personally not interested in reading USENET that much nowadays, the concept of providing free, public access to classic Internet services (public USENET, FTP, IRC, finger, etc.) gets all my praise. What happened to free, public services these days?
First off, what is stopping you from providing free, public access to those services?
I don't know where you are, but I have orders of magnitude more access to freely available content and services than I ever did in the heyday of Usenet, etc. And for most of it, one doesn't have to be highly technical to use it.
Everything appears to to be subscriber pay-as-you-go based. The commercialization killed the free spirit of Internet we all loved in the 90s.
"Free" was never really true, as it required massive subsidies of equipment, power, bandwidth and employee time, usually w/o the direct knowledge or consent of the entities paying for it.
It reminds me of the lemonade stands I'd occasionally run as a kid, which were "profitable" to me because mom and dad, with their knowledge and consent, let me pretend that the costs were $0.
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