Mac created the modern Internet (was RE: I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story)

[Adam C. Engst]

At 9:28 AM -0400 10/19/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>The drive for Internet access came from Mac users. Few consumers had access
>to Unix operating system based machines and Windows 3.1 lacked the Internet
>applications. A host of which was readily available for the Mac and came
>included on floppy in a book by Adam Engst that the novice Mac Internet user
>probably wanted to read anyway. Most of them did.
>
>Which left a single major barrier: $2/hour. This last and probably most
>crucial barrier went away literally during the course of a weekend when a
>Berkeley company called Cyberspace Development announced a revolutionary
>product: The Internet Adapter (TIA). TIA was a user level program that
>allowed the user to pull a SLIP connection out of a regular shell account.
>The program spread like wildfire through the Netcom Macintosh user
>community. Within that single weekend, dozens of people were using TIA.
>Everybody said the same thing: "it works"!
>
>Many shell providers banned TIA. Fortunately, Netcom did not. As one of
>TIA's first users that very weekend, I wrote the "TIA mini-FAQ" on the spot,
>explaining step-by-step in two pages how anybody with a Macintosh can get
>hooked up with real IP within 30 minutes. At flat-rate shell prices. My
>mini-FAQ was in stunningly high demand.
>
>Faced with this sudden flat-rate competition, within a few months the first
>SLIP/PPP provider went to a flat-rate model. Then another. Then a third.
>Providers started sprouting up all over the place. People began using
>Mosaic, which was quickly replaced by several other browsers that started
>showing up for the Mac within a couple of months. Most of the improvements
>in those new Mac browsers were copied by a new startup that was formed soon
>thereafter. That company was Netscape. The remainder of Internet history I
>presume most of us are aware of.

This is close to correct, but not quite. In fact, along with bundling
MacTCP with my Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (which enabled Mac
users to get MacTCP AND a book of instruction for $30 rather than pay
Apple $60 for just MacTCP, if you could find it), the book also came
with a flat-rate SLIP account from Northwest Nexus, my ISP in
Bellevue, WA. What happened was that we'd gone around looking for a
decent SLIP account to bundle with the book, but weren't able to find
anything under $11 per hour. I casually mentioned this to Ed Morin,
the owner of Northwest Nexus (which I'd always used for ISP service
in Washington), and said that I assumed they didn't want to be
bundled because the book would have international distribution and I
thought they wanted to be only a local ISP. Ed said he could have
such problems, and a 4 hour telephone call (which included several
conference calls with Livingston technical support to configure
Nexus's PortMasters for dynamic IP addressing, which had just
appeared in the feature set) later, we had flat-rate SLIP working.
That flat-rate SLIP account was tremendously popular, and Northwest
Nexus attracted customers from all over the world who were willing to
pay long distance charges to avoid the usurious rates for SLIP
locally.

That was the key event in pricing SLIP down, in my opinion, since TIA
came quite a bit later. TIA was another moving force, without
question, but not the first one. I wrote about it in the second
edition of ISKM.

And what I mostly remember about Netcom in those early days was that
their technical support was almost totally non-existent. I helped
many ISKM readers solve problems with Netcom because Netcom wouldn't
respond to email or phone calls. And since I never had a Netcom
account, it was mostly a matter of garnering the specific bits of
setup information from some people so I could help others.

cheers... -Adam

PS: And to bring the story full circle, the person who introduced me
to TIA before it was released so I could write about it in the second
edition of ISKM was Drummond Reed of Intermind, who has subsequently
been the driving force behind the just-released eXtensible Name
Service (XNS) technology that I'm helping guide via the non-profit
XNSORG. Ironically XNS is almost the complete opposite of TIA. Where
TIA was a quick hack that was immediately useful, it also had a very
short lifespan and disappeared entirely as soon as the hardware
appeared for all ISPs to do PPP. In contrast, XNS is a broad
technology platform that has relatively few immediate uses, but
which, if it succeeds, will affect a vast number of things on the
Internet for a long time to come.

<http://www.xns.org/>

______________________________________________________________________
     Adam C. Engst       #2 in MDJ Power 25 / #5 in MacDirectory Top 10
   TidBITS Publisher         <ace at tidbits.com> <http://www.tidbits.com>
   XNSORG President     =Adam Engst <ace at xns.org> <http://www.xns.org/>
  Computer Book Author     <http://www.tidbits.com/bookbits/staff.html>
Macworld Contrib. Editor  <http://www.macworld.com/columns/wiredlife/>

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'