Hi Randy, Randy Bush 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?
umm what history am I re-writing? http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ - is as good a source as any for Internet history, which says this under 1990 "The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access says" ok - one can quibble 1989 (what Barry states on World's home page) PSInet was very late 1989, so there was that, I believe UUnet was 1990 What I did forget was NEARnet - which embarrasses me, since I was at BBN at the time. But, at first, NEARnet limited access to the NSFnet backbone to it's non-commercial customers (at least that was the policy - I'm not sure that filtering was ever really turned on in the gateways). I don't recall whether CSnet had any commercial members.
or are you equating shell access with isp? that would be novel. unix shell != internet.
well now we get to rehash to very old definitional distinction between "Internet Access Provider" and "Internet Service Provider" and yes, if a service provider takes money, to provide access to the Internet in some way, shape, manner, or form, yes - that's providing Internet "access" or "service" - and as soon as dial-up included PPP, then that's a non-issue
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.
The other service Barry provided was pushing the whole issue of commercial access to the backbone. That was kind of epic. And yes, they're still going strong. I still maintain an account - it's my backup for the rare case that I need a separate site for diagnosing issues with our cluster. Cheers, Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra