My Own ISP

I was looking over my resume today—which I haven't kept up-to-date.

When I glanced over the part where I wrote about my adventures as a one man Internet Services Provider, I get a sense of wow come over me. I would never even bother with doing something like this today. Things have changed so much. You see, I physically ran everything from my apartment in Philadelphia. There were no third parties involved (except my upstream provider).

At least I can claim to have done this much on my own, even if at the end it was a commercial failure. Not because I didn't have customers, but because I really didn't make a living off it and it was an uphill battle.

I had Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) run six commercial telephone lines into the apartment (these were used for picking up the dial-up calls) and a 128 KBps ISDN line to my apartment and at my upstream providers location. I bought two Webramp ISDN routers and had one placed at my apartment and the other at my upstream providers location. All my traffic was routed thru this ISDN connection. I still have these routers in their original boxes here.

I had two computers running the whole show (I don't remember the size of the hard drives). The operating system was Windows NT 4 Workstation. One was an AMD 160 Megahertz computer that was serving as the e-mail, Usenet (a few select text groups only), and DNS servers, and the other was a 200-something MHz computer running the Wildcat! Interactive Net Server (WINS). The DNS software I was running was BIND. I remember buying the book DNS and BIND 2nd edition to learn how to setup it up properly.

WINS is a hybrid between a BBS and a TCP/IP server. This was the software that would pick up the dial-up calls and route them to the Internet, or users could stay on the BBS where I also provided interactive casino games. These games are graphical in nature and not the old ASCII type BBS games. I remember that two dial-up customers who, when out of town, would get Internet connections and login to their accounts thru the Internet on my system and play the casino style games.

I also had one in-house dedicated hosting customer--a local Chinese newspaper. This customer alone was paying enough for me to cover the cost of the ISDN service. They kept their computer in my apartment and then logged-in remotely using pcAnywhere to manage their server. A few months later I was providing HTTP and FTP services using the Alibaba HTTP server and Cat-Soft's Serv-U FTP server.

I had a lot of fun and some bad days too, some dial-up customers would be irritated because I was blasting them with too many ads! As much as I tried to explain the Internet to them they could never get it thru their thick heads what the Internet really was. A business customer of mine was calling me to ask how I was able to become partners with Microsoft Corp., I was like what? We all know that when we first run Internet Explorer the first page we see is Microsoft's, so naturally he assumed I was in partnership with the mighty empire and getting rich off the annoying ads. LOL!

Originally posted on one of my blogs by me on December 6, 2005.