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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!
IIRC, AOL didn't offer actual internet access until pretty late in the game.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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...
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
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...
>Yup. On a VAX stolen from Brown & Sharpe.
I saw that Microvax in Andy's basement. "Hey Andy, where'd ya get the Vax?" "We don't talk about that."
"...Ok..." >proceed to turn up Pink Floyd's DSOTM.
After he returned it, he got an ancient 780 and I believe 2 (or 3?) washing machine sized disks.
slightly related tangent -
Ferguson Perforating got rid of their Microvax II one day and I found out that it went to the landfill, because the guy they gave it to couldn't operate the damn thing "and it was old." I was catatonic with disappointment. "DO YOU THROW AWAY A MICROMETER BECAUSE IT'S NOT ELECTRONIC?!" I yelled.
It was 1993/4. Still the heyday of the BBS networks. I could have created a beast of a multiline setup bigger than Andy's. *grumble grumble*
--
BMO
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.
Comcast makes everything seem like the 80's
Table-ized A.I.
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.)