[ih] Commercial ISPs (Re: Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership)

[Tony Finch]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2010, Ofer Inbar wrote:
>
> Saying that STD was "not a network" is ambiguous in the current context.
>
> It was "not a network" but neither were the rest of the consumer ISPs
> that followed them in the next few years.  IP to the home was very
> rare.  Mostly, people got dialup accounts to Unix servers where they
> logged in to a shell from which they could run stuff,

The situation in the UK was rather different. IP connectivity to the home
was normal for ISPs based on the way Demon Internet pioneered consumer
Internet connectivity (starting in 1992). I think part of the reason was
per-minute call charges made it undesirable for users to sit on the phone
while reading mail and news on a remote shell server; instead they
downloaded it for reading offline.

(PIPEX was founded earlier, in 1990, but it concentrated more on
commercial customers, one of which was Demon.)

Tony.
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