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