[ih] Internet History - Commercialization

[Vint Cerf]

nice story - nostalgic too.

v


On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 5:06 AM John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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