On Jul 11, 2014, at 8:18 PM, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
And, for the record, it's pretty widely acknowledge that "The World" (Barry Shein) was the world's first commercial ISP - offering shell access in 1989, and at some point started offering PPP dial-up services. As I recall, they were a UUnet POP. yep. and uunet and psi were hallucinations. can we please not rewrite well-known history? or are you equating shell access with isp? that would be novel. unix shell != internet.
btw, not do denigrate what barry did. a commercial unix bbs connected to the real internet was significant. the left coasties were doing free stuff, the well, community memory, ... and barry created a viable bbs commercial service which still survives (i presume). a significant achievement.
randy
Not to take away from Barry, but around that same time, some of us left coasts were also helping to build Netcom as a viable commercial entity providing shell and later PPP and dedicated line access (DS0, T1). Owen