Who was the first isp

We take the Internet and the companies that provide it (ISPs) for granted today. It almost seems like accessing the Information Superhighway is a right, “endowed by our Creator” and ranking among basic human rights like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” There was a time when someone had to take a chance and bring the world wide web to the public. It was a huge chance to take and risked being shut down at any time.

In 1989 the Internet was used for nothing more than a platform to be used for communication for national defense and for scientists to share research. Things changed that year. In Brookline, Massachusetts a company called The World decided to take a change. The company was founded as Software Tool & Die earlier in 1989. Their first server was a Sun4/280 with two 474MB disks of storage which more than met their needs so they decided to offer an email service as well as usenet online discussion group services to the public.

There were commercial Internet providers already in existence. Telenet is widely believed to be the first commercial ISP launching in 1974. In 1989 there were two of them to be exact, UUNET and PSI. These companies had thousands of dollars worth of equipment and charged thousands of dollars for high-speed connectivity of a whoppng 1.5 Mbps. There was nothing for the average person though but that changed.

Software Tool & Die purchased six modems along with phone lines and connected to other servers in the area. Every so often they dialed up another server and exchanged data with it using this new service that they called The World. Local college campuses were targeted for potential users since those people were more likely to be familiar with email and usenets and they responded. The World was simply hoping to break even and have enough users to cover equipment and power cost but dozens of new clients came on board. The pricing model had to be devised from scratch and set up different hourly charges for different times of the day mirroring phone pricing. If a customer wanted a file from the Internet someone had to request it and it would be downloaded and manually posted to The World.

Things were getting better. UUNET, which was also in the Boston area and founded by a friend of The World’s founder, called and asked if they could locate a rack’s worth of equipment with The World. The cost of housing this equipment would be any extra bandwidth that was available. That was found to be acceptable and in October 1989 The World became the world’s first ISP offering access to the Internet for $20 per month. Domains were purchased and everything seemed to be rosy.

That was until the government stepped in. The Internet was at the time run by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and connection was heavily restricted. A user had to be at an academic or research facility, be working on a research grant from a government agency, be at an accredited university or in the military. The NSF objected to someone selling access to the public, both because of security concerns but also because the Internet was a government service and selling it for commercial purposes was believed to be illegal. Questions were posed, like what would happen if someone sent a threatening email or accessed something that they should not have. After pondering for a bit The World decided that they could not do much besides closing the account.

The NSF did not cut off The World from the Internet but did succeed in blocking about ⅔ of it from their users. Some private individuals were also up in arms, believing that they were selling government property for profit. The World reasoned that their service was no different than using a tour company to see a national park, they were not selling government property, just access to it.

For their customers there was nothing that they could do. The World was the only game in the world (pun intended!) so they could do nothing but wait and see how the situation was resolved. This was hard, their customer base came from all corners of the globe. Many of their customers paid international long distance rates to connect just to read email. After a long wait the NSF called and set up a meeting. Acceptable terms of service would need to be set up and with that the restrictions were lifted.

The rest is history. The World is still in business today, offering low-cost dial-up services to the public as well as email services in the United States and Canada and have around 1,700 users. The company’s website has few frills which is perfect for dial-up users. Other companies, many of whom have been forgotten or bought up, followed and today there are over 2,600 ISPs all over the world.

Those who were of computing age in the ’80s and ’90s probably remember the late-night dial-up sessions: The horrible noise of the modem as you fired up the AOL service, the anticipation as you waited to access the internet over a phone line. As we got into the mid ’90s, more and more of us were puzzling over the amazing new invention known as “the internet.”

Most folks weren’t able to get online at home until the 1990s, when internet service providers (or ISPs) became more common. ISPs revolutionized communication and brought technology to the masses through rebellion, competition and innovation.

First, the rebellion

For years, the National Science Foundation banned commercial ISPs, permitting only government agencies and universities to use the internet.

In 1989, that changed.

“The World” appeared as the first commercial ISP, when a group of tech-savvy warriors pushed up their glasses and said “no more.”

Sure, back then it was still staggeringly slow dial-up, but The World did exceptionally well in its first two years. Its radical newness generated a wide consumer base. By 1991, the NSF gave up and lifted the ban. A new era of technology was born.

The commercial ISP business took off following The World’s success. Early providers included CompuServe, The Source, and the overwhelmingly popular America Online — AOL. Consumers with nothing to compare it to were fine with the blazing speed of a dial-up connection at 2,400 bits per second. (That’s just .0024 Mbps!)

At such slow speeds, internet users of the ’90s were limited online. Even so, rudimentary video games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario 64 swept the nation alongside text-based webpages and simple, boxy graphics. Anonymous chatrooms became enormously popular as consumers discovered the joy of different-colored fonts and inspired usernames. If that seems primitive by today’s standards, it was — but no one really knew then what the internet would eventually be capable of.

Of course, consumers began to crave internet service at faster speeds, and ISPs did their best to keep up.

DSL comes onto the scene

A “digital subscriber line” — DSL — was the first form of faster internet services known as broadband. DSL carried the internet signal through existing phone lines at a much faster speed than dial-up. DSL was typically better for urban subscribers, because the closer they were to a city center, the faster their internet was. In some ways, that hasn’t changed much.

The higher speeds of DSL spurred even more technological revolution in broadband services. Fierce competition arose between ISPs who sought to provide customers with the next best thing. In the next 20 years, commercial ISPs offered cable internet and fiber optic lines of communication.

Cable residential broadband was introduced in 1996. This service used existing cable TV infrastructure to transmit data at faster speeds than DSL. Cable provided a more direct connection to the internet for those who lived in more heavily populated areas.

Fiber optic lines followed quickly on the heels of cable, and achieved an even speedier rate of data transfer. These lines were made of flexible strands of glass, allowing data to move at the speed of light, but at a much higher cost.

However, since DSL, cable, and fiber optic lines all required expensive infrastructure buildout, these services were typically limited to urban and suburban areas with higher concentrations of people. It didn’t make much sense for terrestrial ISPs to pay to run a cable all the way outside towns to provide internet to just a few homes. That meant that people in rural areas were being left behind in this technological revolution, with slow dial-up or – in some places – no internet at all.

Satellite bridges the gaps

The arrival of internet via satellite helped close those gaps in service. Satellite internet is not limited by cables or contained only to densely populated areas. Instead, a satellite sends and receives internet signals from space directly to an antenna (dish) on your home. If you were in the satellite’s coverage area with a clear view of the southern sky, chances are you could get it — no matter where you lived. Many rural families were finally able to connect to the internet using this technology.

In 2005, WildBlue – the precursor to Exede, which later became Viasat Internet – was one of the first to offer this kind of service. By today’s standards, it was still pretty slow — topping out at 3 Mbps download speeds. But it was still a big leap forward from dial-up.

Speed and data plans improved tremendously with the launch of the ViaSat-1 satellite in 2011 and the Exede service in 2012. By building a satellite with a great deal more capacity, Viasat was able to change the game in terms of what kind of speeds and data plans satellite could offer. In 2017, Viasat launched ViaSat-2, with even more capacity able to offer even faster speeds and greater data plans.

And in the next few years, we will launch ViaSat-3, a constellation of three satellites with the capacity and coverage to service much of the globe. ViaSat-3 has the potential to make Viasat the first global ISP, as well as to demonstrate how satellite can mean digital inclusion for all those unconnected people out there.

From the early days of slow, limited internet to blazing-fast broadband for everyone, ISPs have come a long way — and satellite may prove the most extraordinary breakthrough of them all.