At 7:03 PM 9/24/96, Hal wrote:

The ISP which I have used for over five years, portal.com, is going out of business at the end of this month (September, 1996). This means that my remailer at hfinney@shell.portal.com will cease operations. I had asked that it be removed from the remailer lists a few weeks ago due to some problems, so hopefully not many people have been using it lately. But now it will go away for good.

This remailer has been in operation since the fall of 1991. I believe it ^^^^^^^^^^^^ You obviously mean "fall of 1992."

Anyway, congratulations on all of your work back then (in 1992 :-)), and for running it for so long. I, too, was a Portalite, from 1988-1992 (when I switched to Netcom, which offered a local POP (point of presence) in Santa Cruz). Portal was the first major ISP to offer accounts to non-academic users. They were also heavily used by those who'd signed up with "PC-Pursuit," a flat-rate phone service which made it feasible to dial-in to Portal from anywhere in the country. When the plug was pulled on PC-Pursuit, circa mid-89, the prospects for Portal dimmed as well. (My own usage dropped dramatically when PC-Pursuit was canned, as dialing-in to Portal directly was costing me $6-10 an hour, depending on the time of day. Once I got on with Netcom, in 1992, I was able to join various mailing lists, including the Extropians list and of course the Cypherpunks list.) I haven't been following the fortunes of Portal for a couple of years, but its relative absence from the playing field of Netcom, Best, Earthlink, etc. has been pretty noticeable. So I can't say I'm surprised it's going away. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."