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Barry Shein Founded the First Dialup ISP (Video)
Back in the dawn of prehistory, only universities, government agencies, and a few big corporations could get on the Internet. The rest of us either had computers connected to nothing (except maybe an electric outlet), Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL or another service or possibly to an online bulletin board service (BBS). And then, one day in 1989, Barry Shein hooked a server and some modems to an Internet node he managed for a corporate/academic wholesale Internet provider -- and started selling dialup accounts for $20 per month to individuals, small companies, and just about anyone else who came along. Barry called his ISP The World, which is still out there with a retro home page ("Page last modified April 27, 2006"), still selling shell accounts. We may run a second interview with Barry next week, so please stay tuned. (Alternate Video Link)
I want to say "First", but I also want to say that I knew Barry back when he started this whole thing. Congrats on your staying power!
I think AOL was the first to do this...
Flash video, seriously? Slashdot continues its slide into irrelevance...
It looks like he is still using dialup.
The company I worked for was dialing into UUNET back in 1987/88. Why aren't they considered the first?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Think again. AOL, prodigy, compuserve were all proprietary, isolated systems. They did not provide internet access. It wasn't until 89/90 that there email services could even talk to each other (via the internet).
Source: old enough to have listed compuserve "forums" and AOL "keywords" on my business cards...
This was pretty sweet back in the day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... (Not to be confused with Telnet)
All of these Google+ interviews are nearly unwatchable due to the really poor audio/video quality... Ugh.
Just had a good laugh with my wife. We got our first dialup account with The World back in the early 90's. Wrote my first scripts because of that account (and the usenet).
damn those were heady days. Substantive discussions. Thoughtful comments. My how things have degraded in just about any forum you care to pick.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Don't forget about FidoNet :)
This is the problem with the internet, the rewriting of history. Mindlink in Burnaby bc had full telnet, fido, archy etc well before 1989.
Top of page: "New Pricing And Services Effective September 1, 2010"
So, yeah, wouldn't trust the "Page last modified" date.
Barry and "The World" a.k.a Software Tool and Die and Trumpet Winsock were my tickets to the internet world (pardon the pun) back in the day. I had a whole private network running off a dial-up connection! Sometimes I miss those days. Thanks, Barry.
Dialing into a BBS, bouncing into a schools system and then access the net not considered the first dialup isp?
Something I did in '83.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Before I got a Sysop account at Compuserve, I paid $9.95 if memory serves.
All the companies were there to download updates from, you could download libraries, utilities, examples, FAQs and Howtos, talk with the programmers, whine to the quality assurance people, you could buy books, jeans and coffee an some other stuff, play multiplayer games (all text) send email to the world, read usenet newsgroups, get email newsletters (tweets with no limit, for the young whippersnappers amongst you) and later also use the web.
Why would people pay the double for what exactly? :-)
Do I have to RTFA for that?
But Al Gore invented the first dialup folks.
It even took 30 seconds for the TheWorld.com web page to load, just like a real dialup line!
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
is out of whack.
GO read his site.
"Yes, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out of your head.
(although I've heard it since from other sources and attributed to Ann Landers, Carl Sagan and others I'm pretty sure this one was original when I said it and others have attributed the quote to me. "
It was Walter Kotschnig, who Carl was quoting in DHW. That Statement with lightly different verbiage goes back 150 years, and probably older.
TECO is basically perl? Please. Perl doesn't stand for anything, and TECO is closer to freaking COBOL then perl.
As a reminder you're not the only one that's been working with computers for 40+ years.
Narcissistic ass.
I don't know who really can make that claim but Intelecom Data Systems in Rhode Island was offering dialup Internet access to the public in 1987, including SLIP (and later PPP.)
Except fidonet nodes could talk to each other. I ran a node for only mail relay in Southern Ontario from 92-96(from the time I was in middle school to the time I was nearly finished high school), because a bunch of BBS's in the area were choking the only provider at the time for mail requests. By the time late '96 had come around most people had moved to ISP's and BBS's around here were dying. Oh BRE, FRE, and LORD how I do miss you at times.
Om, nomnomnom...
Add $5.00/month for unlimited* dial-up.
* Unlimited does not mean 24 by 7 connectivity. It means unmetered, interactive usage. Sessions inactive for more than 20 minutes are subject to disconnection. Attempts to defeat inactivity detection may result in additional charges or termination of service.
IF IT'S FUCKING LIMITED, DON'T FUCKING CALL IT UNLIMITED!
How hard is it to just say "Add $5.00/month for unmetered, interactive usage" without an asterisk and a bunch of bullshit between "Add $5" and the description of what you actually get for your five bucks?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't know who was first but I was on Wetware Diversions, a dial-up ISP in San Francisco connected to the Internet in as early as 1987 and it was up before then. I paid a certain amount of money (I don't remember the amount) to dial in to their servers with my Supra 2400bps modem via telnet I recall, and I read Usenet there.
DNS wasn't even in use at the time I recall as e-mail addresses still needed to use bangs ("!") for routing, which made it difficult for me to send e-mail because I didn't know the names of various routers so I could route my e-mail through them to reach its destination. (I'm not exactly sure of the technical side of things; please forgive me.) In other words, we didn't use @schoolname.edu to send e-mail. We had to do something like routerone!routertwo!routerfive!schoolname etc. to address our e-mails. You can see examples of this in the link below.
I did a quick search for "Wetware Diversions" and came up with this long list of ISPs going back as far as 1988:
http://www.phrack.org/issues/29/4.html
(Posting as AC because I don't have a /. account yet.)
Ok, this guy in my post here is not Barry Shein. Posting anonymously just in case someone can figure out who it is...
Anyway I was a sysadmin on some Unix and VMS machines at one work site. At one point I hooked into Usenet via another department within the company, but was always a bit nervous about it as this was a large defense contractor that was paranoid about any outside network connections. I only wanted the technical newsgroups and some access to external email but I did allow a few choice non-tech sites through (local for-sale stuff and the like).
One of the users would ask me, jokingly, if I would add alt.sex.bondage. I would refuse of course, laughing. I had limited disk space and limited dialup bandwidth, and very low seniority. I'd say I would do it if I got a memo from the president of the company, which I knew would never happen. But every month or so John Doe would ask again, could he get alt.sex.bondage. I'd give the same excuses and roll my eyes. After awhile I was not sure if he was just keeping a long running joke going or if he wasn't really joking after all. But I left the company after awhile.
A few years later one of my friends mentioned that John Doe started his own company. It was one of the larger ISPs around at the time for people who wanted dialup access to their school or company's mainframes, access to Usenet, a shell account, and so forth. This was in 1988 or 1989, with actual dialup. Later when the web started taking off they provided early access and get very large. So this really was a big pioneer of "the internet" you might say.
So in hindsight one of the things I've been wondering ever since, is whether or not my refusal to supply alt.sex.bondage was a key motivator to kicking off the internet revolution. Me and Al Gore, we should be buddies.
Yeah, not the first. There were multiple public ISPs in Portland in 1989. PDxs, agora, Teleport...
One is still around, nearly 30 years later - Raindrop Laboratories http://www.rdrop.com/ still has its "vintage" mid '90s web page, too. (It has been around since 1985.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Portland had "agora" in 1985. PDxs and Teleport joined in 1987.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I was dialing up to Freenets back in 1988, paying for 'privileged' access (though they were non-profit) and was using email, archie, gopher, IRC, etc... Wouldn't this be considered an ISP?
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Don't forget about FidoNet :)
FidoNet was something different.
I'm not saying it's irrelevant to the conversation. Not by any means. It holds a very important place in history. But it was it's own, separate thing. It wasn't the Internet, and it wasn't the commercial online services.
In a way, it was the first "common man's" global network. Sure, the Internet existed, and ARPAnet before that, but for many years they were only available to the privileged few.
Fido Net was a way for a regular guy to use his computer to communicate with people outside of his home town.
Seems like nothing today. Back then it was a HUGE deal.
I had raw IP dialup in 1989 in Tucson, Arizona. It's so long ago, that I don't recall the name of the company, but they were not new in 1989. And, there were other options.
@_jeff_nelson +jeffnelsonjeffnelson
Yeah, not the first. There were multiple public ISPs in Portland in 1989. PDxs, agora, Teleport...
One is still around, nearly 30 years later - Raindrop Laboratories http://www.rdrop.com/ still has its "vintage" mid '90s web page, too. (It has been around since 1985.)
If you follow the "Alan Batie" link from RainDrop's home page, and then follow his "agora" link from "I work at Peak Internet, a local ISP in Corvallis, Oregon. I also run a small ISP in Portland, Oregon, called RainDrop Laboratories. It started in 1985 as a public access system called Agora, while I was working at Intel.", it speaks of agora's RainNet Internet access starting in 1990 - "Now that our subject had SVR4, with TCP/IP and all, and there being several other hacker sorts around town who'd been eyeing the Internet with envy for sometime, it was time to see if something could be done locally. RAINet was thus born in the fall of 1990, and its first connection was a 2400 bps SLIP link between agora and parsely (another local public access system, owned by Tod Oace at the time)."
(Remember, unless you actually Provide a Service that lets you send IP packets onto the Internet, you're not an Internet Service Provider. Dialup BBSes don't count, UUCP doesn't count, only SLIP/PPP/bridged Ethernet/PPPoEoAoDSL/PPPoAoDSL/DOCSIS/etc. so that you can splat out one of these things - or one of these things - onto the Internet counts.)
Back in '89 I was a member of the Boston Computer Society's Commodore Users Group. I remember when The World started up and I signed up for an account. It was a thrill to log in on my Commodore 128 with a 2400 baud modem and telnet, ftp, or gopher around the world. Remember Fidonet and when ISPs gave you a free subscription to newsgroups? I'm sorry to say that the thrill is gone since the Internet became a corporate environment.
Is it possible anyone is naive enough to still be paying Barry $50/month for their 50MB storage / 2GB of transfer web hosting?
Lots of guys did - Karl Denninger in Chicago and Greg Laskin LA. But they were UUCP not IP connections.
Need Mercedes parts ?
" It holds a very important place in history"
Only in fido-land. It was a pox to the rest of the net.
Q:How do you know when the Fido boys tried to gateway again?
A: there are 300 posts in alt.aquaria. 280 of them are the same.
Every. Friggin. Time.
And no I don't know why your tank is green.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I remember their daily message (msgs) had "Hello, world -- dmr" for the longest time. Also that Barry had very long discussions with NSFNet folks (Steven Wolffe?) about AUP, as the first commercial ISP.
(as I was going to say of course /. is immune from such pettiness...)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Based on first-hand information, and belief, The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link - The WELL, a product of Whole Earth Access - was first to offer dialup Internet accounts to paying customers.
I specifically remember having an account on The Well, back in 1985. You needed a credit card to sign up, but John Draper ('Captain Crunch') told me that there was a back door - just enter all zeroes, and they would send you a bill. I tried it. It worked. I created an account - tyger@well.com - and that was my first paid UNIX account, on a VAX 11/750, I think ... in 1985, if I recall correctly.
Barry seems to have trouble dealing with the fact that he was not first.
He can't stop claiming otherwise.
His entire reputation depends upon promoting an alternate version of events.
Kind of like his claim that he wrote xman(1).
Well, yes, SOMEBODY wrote xman(1).
But where's all the other software that Barry wrote, later?
Some of us suspect that Barry had a little help with his graduating project.
If you want to read more about Barry Shein's antics, please see this website describing an unlawful termination lawsuit against Oracle, in which Barry Shein played a prominent part:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040408124353/http://www.orafraud.org/Oracle/terminator.html
I'm not saying that Barry Shein is pathological, but it's a question that should be asked.
I signed up for a World account in the first days of his operation, and still maintain my account there. It remains my main email account of last resort, even though I have two email domains now. The interviewer and Barry perhaps didn't know about the dialup BBSing that went on before there was a commodity internet available. As a note, I dialed up to his system in Boston for about 2 or 3 bucks an hour, so it wasn't cheap, but it didn't break the bank either. (From Irvine, Ca.). Later a company here in Irvine, network intensive started to offer a dialin locally and the cost went to a flat 10 or 20 bucks a month to get a PPP dialin connection, which could be left up on a phone line, sort of like todays connection. In fact it was about 1/3 the speed of DSL if anyone cares. Back to the main topic, the BBS craze was hot from the late 70s to 89 and was as big as anything around. You would get large grouped networks of BBSs and you could dial into a local one, and they would all sync with each other in various ways. I see the Tomcat package now, and recall one package that was huge back then. There were also Mustang BBS's. Many small fortunes were made into nothing with the craze as some companies (I think Mustang was one of them) went to revenue, and you would pay thousands to get a system to run on a big bank of PC hardware and inbound modems. This all went into the tank overnight when World and then several other companies came on the scene. As to what did you do? He didn't mention Gopher and FTP. The main use of dialups later on was to trade software, some legal, some not so much. The Internet was a trove of such stuff and a utility much like Google, called Gopher was out there. It didn't offer anything but indexing and file name searching, but was far better than the BBS scene where there were indexes of various quality available, and you would have to call and register to get things on distant BBSs. The email was interesting, but newcommers like me from the land of BBS didn't have a lot of use for it, though as various people started to use Usenet and that grew you could make friends and use it more. As he mentioned if you were laid off, you had contacts you lost, and that world didn't intersect much with the BBS directly.