On Jul 11, 2014, at 10:31 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
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
...and CRL, and shortly after Netcom came Scruznet, and ... (Still giggling at how many times CRL got the intersection of Market/Geary/Kearny dug up in the early 90s bringing fiber in...). George William Herbert Sent from my iPhone