[ih] Internet History - Commercialization

[John Gilmore]

On 18/02/2019 15:35, Tony Finch wrote:
> > I was wondering what effect KA9Q had on low-end adoption. I turned up
> > later, but I remember stories from early (1992 ish) dial-up commercial
> > Internet users who relied on KA9Q.

=?UTF-8?Q?Olivier_MJ_Cr=c3=a9pin-Leblond?= <ocl at gih.com> wrote:
> It was key to the Internet's development in the UK. Cliff Stanford
> started Demon Internet using Phil's KA9Q stack. Without it, dial-up
> Internet access at home/work was just not possible.

We started a prominent San Francisco Bay Area ISP, The Little Garden,
using Phil Karn's KA9Q MSDOS software to handle leased lines and dialup
modems in 2 locations in August 1990.  I was one of the techies who
cobbled it together, with a leased line to the very early Alternet, then
we hired Tom Jennings, who had also implemented the FIDOnet, to
professionalize it for growing to serve other sites.  It gradually grew
it into a real ISP with ten megabits of upstream connections.  The
Little Garden offered the first commercial dialup Internet connections
in Mountain View and San Francisco, CA, and also offered 56Kbit DS0 and
Frame Relay, and 1.5Mbit T1 connections.  Because of our libertarian
usage policies, low prices, and solid technical chops, we became the
backbone for dozens of small ISPs in Northern California, like ScruzNet
(Santa Cruz), NBnet (North Bay), etc.

We wouldn't have gotten it off the ground without KA9Q, which was the
only cheap and modifiable way to gateway multiple dialup or nailed-up
modems to the early commercial leased-line Internet.  Eventually KA9Q
was too flakey for our level of traffic, and we replaced it with
commercial routers, but that was after a year or two of KA9Q service.

	John Gilmore