the first ISP

by Spike Ilacqua
<spike@indra.com>

Spike Ilacqua has been an "Internet professional" since 1989, first at The World in Boston, then as co-founder of Indra's Net in Boulder. He has a high school diploma and a pretty cool car.



It's not my fault. But sometimes I think it might be. My name is Spike. You've probably never heard of me, but in 1989 I did something that had an impact on the Internet today. I started the first ISP.

Actually I didn't, Barry Shein did, I just actually made it work. In 1989 Barry started a small UNIX consulting company call Software Tool & Die. There wasn't a lot of consulting that summer, but there were a lot of calls for people who wanted to know where they could find access to email and USENET News.

You might not know what USENET News is either, but it was the reason people got online before someone thought up the Web. Lots of discussion groups with lots of people posting messages. Not in realtime, mind you. But it was like, as someone more clever than I once said, the world's biggest cocktail party.

STD (yes, I know) had really good news. Barry is, was, and always will be a USENET junkie. Word must have gotten around 'cause people who'd lost their access at school (pretty much the only way to get it back then) came nosing around looking for access. Barry had an idea: let's sell it to them.

It wasn't really a new idea. There was The Well in San Francisco, Portal might have been up and running by then, and by that time countless BBSs (which you may have never been a part of either). But nothing east of the Mississippi that we knew of.

So off we went to the BitBucket to buy six 2400bps modems (with MNP 5 and maybe Retsyn). Then came a number of sleepless nights while I wrote account-creation software, installed all the software our UNIX-hungry future customers might want, made modem cables (really) to connect up those modems to a Sun (like they made Toy Story with only much bigger and much slower and, well, only one), and drank a lot of Coke. Jim Frost wrote billing software, drank Mountain Dew, and ate Cheeze-its.

On a fine Boston (OK, Brookline) day early in November 1989, our first customer logged on and The World was born.

Those were the days. I was the sysadmin, the tech support guy, and, when Jim moved on to greener pastures (this is before there was any money in the Internet), the system programmer too. I drank a lot of Coke and ate a lot of ramen noodles.

Now, back then if you weren't an institute of higher learning or a defense contractor, you couldn't be on the "Internet." You got your email and news using UUCP, old-style. With UUCP you called other computers and exchanged mail and news with them, and they called other computers and passed it on and so on and so on. Clunky, but it worked. Someone once said, Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 1/4" tapes (think "minivan full of Zip disks"), and the same can be said for lots of 2400 and later 9600bps (sort of) modems.

But all things change. Sometime in 1990 the National Science Foundation decided they'd like less involvement in running the Internet (you didn't even know the NSF ran it, did you?). So they began what is popularly called, in Socialist countries, privatizing the Internet. One company to take advantage of this was UUNET, the king of the above-mentioned UUCP. They formed a new company called Alternet to provide Internet service. At this point, gentle reader, you'll be able to guess who Alternet turned to when they needed space in Boston (OK, Brookline) to install equipment.

Naturally we got connected as part of the deal.

But it wasn't that simple. In 1990 the NSF still ran the Internet backbone (which despite what you hear every day doesn't exist anymore) and you still had to be an institute of higher learning or a defense contractor to be connected. We could get to the parts of the Internet that were connected to Alternet and a few other networks that were privately interconnected with them (they call it peering in the modern era), but not the bulk of it. Frankly, this sucked. Everything good was always somewhere else (and there wasn't even a Web yet). Even worse, try explaining this paragraph on tech support calls all day. People always want what you ain't got.

If you've been around for a while and have read USENET, and in that unlikely event "read" something other than porn (yep, USENET has more porn that you can shake a stick at), you've probably come across Barry Shein. And if you've come across Barry you know not to argue with him or at least that you'd better have your facts straight and be damn sure of them. The man has forgotten more than I'll ever know, has a better command of the English language than Danielle Steele, drinks way way too much coffee, and somehow knows how everything comes down to the Battle of Hastings (1066 A.D.). Much of my skill as a business person comes from all those years of trying to explain to Barry why my idea was better.

Anyway, in late 1992 Barry turned his awesome powers on the NFS. And eventually they relented. The NSF allowed companies to sell dialup access to the Internet with some lame disclaimer about how those customers would probably be working with an institute of higher learning or defense contractor.

So that's how on August 13, 1992, I was running the very first official ISP. Oh, sure it was only a day or two before the other guys got their permission. Hell, by the next year the rules had been pretty much thrown out all together.

But there you have it, the first ISP.

Nine years have passed. I now run my own ISP in lovely (whiter whites, brighter colors) Boulder, Colorado. The World is still there and so is Barry, though it's now a Silicon Graphics (like they used for Jurassic Park). When they write the history books of the Internet, my name won't come up. Maybe The World will, maybe it won't. If it hadn't been me it would have been someone. But I was there and I did the deed and somehow, just maybe, as I filter the spam out of my inbox and see the Web address on the side of trucks and cans of soda, it may be partially my fault.