The Origins of Earthlink

get cozy with the following sound. Yep, that's the sound of a dial up modem making a connection with another modem. And the company is earth Link, which is very much an active company today, though that might surprise some of you who might think that it had its heyday and then just faded into obscurity. Nope, it's still here. I

passed the building sometimes here in Atlanta. So we're going to learn about the history of earth Link, what the company does, and we're gonna learn a bit about how the Internet works and dial up modems as well, because heck, this is tech stuff. Also because we're covering so much stuff, we're looking at a couple of episodes here, my favorite, but to tell the story of earth Link will also have to dive into a lot of other stuff to

to really understand what's going on. So we're going to have, like I said, a refresher on how the Internet works from a structural standpoint. I'm not going to get into protocols or any of that, but more of a high level look at how the Internet works. And we're going to understand what Internet service providers do and why they're a necessity for the vast majority of us. And we'll also learn about a company that competed with earth Link early on and why that company is the reason that

earth Link has its HQ in Atlanta. So this might take, you know, like I said, a couple of episodes to cover everything, but it's a great way to learn about the Internet in general and the gradual shift to broadband methods of connecting to the Internet. Now, our story begins in the nineteen seventies with a fellow named Sky Dylan Dayton.

I was going to make a Sky is the Limit joke here, but if you do even a cursory Internet search for Sky Dayton and that's d A Y T O N, you will see that I have been beaten by the punch by hang on. Let me check my notes. Um, yeah, looks like everybody, So I'm gonna spare you and Mr Dayton the hacky pun this time. Dayton was born in nineteen seventy one in New York City. His family relocated to Los Angeles when he was a bebe and his

parents were both artists. His father, Wendell Dayton, was a sculptor and his mother, Alice DeWitt, was a musician poet. Alice's father, David DeWitt, was an IBM fellow and appointed position with an IBM that marks distinguished achievement at the company. And so now we begin our tale. Sky's parents relocated from New York to Los Angeles in nineteen seventy two, and they would divorce in nineteen seventy five, and they shared custody of young Sky. Wendell Dayton took on jobs

as a carpenter to earn money for Sky's education. And side note, Wendell's story is actually a pretty incredible one. He made really interesting sculptures that were reflective of his time in New York City. They kind of grew out of artistic movements that were prevalent in New York City in the seventies. And late sixties, but that unfortunately meant that they didn't really mesh with the artistic movements that were prevalent in Los Angeles. There was a different kind

of artistic philosophy in that part of the country. In addition, Wendell really hated submitting his art to galleries. He was reluctant to do it. It caused him a lot of anxiety, so he largely went unrecognized for his work until he got a big break in when he was eighty years old and a gallery held an exhibit that showed off his work from like six decades of his sculpture. He passed away in twenty nineteen. I can't find much information

about Alice DeWitt, which really is a shame. I find references to her being a poet and a dancer in addition to being a musician, but it's hard to track down specifics, and it's quite possible that I'm just looking in the wrong places. But I find it's sad that I can't find out much about her as opposed to finding full articles about Wendel. As for David DeWitt, it's important to note this is not the same David DeWitt who is a pioneer with database technology Ease and is

a technical fellow with Microsoft. The David DeWitt and Sky's family became an IBM fellow in nineteen seventy, and that timeline just doesn't work out with the Microsoft technical fellow David DeWitt, who got his PhD in the mid seventies. I can't find much more information about David DeWitt, but I know that Sky Dayton has written about visiting his grandfather's office in Palo Alto, California as a child and

being introduced to technology around that time. Not long after that visit with his grandfather, Sky got his first computer, which was a Sinclair z X eight e one. These computers came from Dundee, Scotland, and they were made by time X, the watch company. Sky was nine years old at the time, so that puts the set around nineteen eighty and honestly, I'm kind of shocked that that was

his first computer. I would have pegged it as an Apple too, being out of California in the early eighties, that would have been the right kind of timing that to be the first computer, especially since the Sinclair computers were not nearly as well known here in the States as they were in Europe. Anyway, back to our story. At some point in his childhood, Sky's parents enrolled him in the Delphian School, which is a private boarding school

in Oregon. The school covers grades kindergarten through twelve, and they had fewer than three hundred students, so the students would actually live at the school and go to school and stay there. And the school doesn't follow the same sort of curricula and structure as public schools in the United States. From what I understand, it seems like students really stay on a subject until they have shown an understanding and mastery of that subject, rather than having to

move on at a set time. So, for example, if you were particularly strong in the field of algebra, you might complete that course before a school year is up and then move on to the next course in mathematics or flip wise, if you found it particularly challenging, you might just stick with algebra a little bit longer in order to reach that level of understanding. There wasn't like at this arbitrary date you must move on or be

held back. Sky Dayton graduated from the Delphian School in nine and rather than apply to college, he decided to strike out into business, and one early entrepreneurial endeavor was a coffee shop and art gallery that he co founded with a friend. The name of the shop was Cafe Mocha. In nineteen two, Dayton would co found another business with a friend, a different friend, and this business was a design company that created graphics and layouts for advertising campaigns,

and it was called Dayton Slash Walker Design. But something else was starting to consume Sky's attention. See Sky wanted to connect to the Internet. In the nineteen eighties, there was a growing culture of bulletin board systems or bbs is. And this is not Internet, but it's similar, And here's

how they would work. Someone would set up a computer to act as a bulletin board, to host the bulletin board, and it was kind of like a web server, except this approach had a computer standing as its own little island, and it would host stuff like message boards and maybe some files. And the bbs would have a specific phone number associated with it, or maybe a small bank of phone numbers, and that would allow people to dial directly into the computer. So there are no other connections here.

It's computer to computer connections. And computer owners with a dial up modem would use their modem to call the BBS number. I'll get into the process of what happens with dial up modems a little bit later in this episode, but essentially what happens is that the user and the BBS computer connect to each other and then they can interact with the actual stuff that's on the BBS. By the early nine nineties, we were starting to see this

transition into actual Internet services. The Internet had already been a thing for a while, but only a small percentage of folks in the general population even knew about it. It was largely the domain no pun intended of academia and some research facilities, and then a few government divisions, particularly the military. And keep in mind that is when Tim berners Lee would really start working on the earliest web pages. Is typically when people say that he built

the first one. So this is really pre Worldwide Web that hadn't really taken off yet. Rather than connect to the Worldwide Web, people were using the Internet to do stuff like send emails or use FTP as in File Transfer Protocol, or maybe use tell net, which is a way to create a virtual terminal connection between multiple machines for the purposes of text based communication. The main method of connecting to theseervices was through dial up modems, but

the process of connecting wasn't always a smooth one. The early online service providers and Internet service providers were essentially working out the bugs in the system, and it often meant that it could take a long time to connect, or connections would drop, or sometimes you would lose stuff

in mid transfer. Online service providers like America Online, Prodigy, and compu Serve would allow users to access a suite of services and features that were contained within those services, but they had little or sometimes no access to the Internet at large, So it's more like logging into a glorified bulletin board system, a big one, but one that still had barriers, and it usually meant that if you were a customer of one and your buddy was a

customer of another one, you couldn't send messages to each other because you were confined by the barriers of that service. Internet service providers, which gave access to the Internet at

large were not that common yet. Then there was the world widely recognized as the first commercial I s P. Not universally recognized as such, but there are a lot of people who argue it was and that launched in There were a couple of others, but they were pretty limited and Sky Dayton found the experience of connecting to the Internet really irritating, and to make matters worse, the company he was using didn't have a good customer service department.

This kind of got the wheels turning in Sky's head. Right around nine, he started thinking about launching his own Internet service provider company, and he wanted to have more of a focus on customer service. I think it's pretty obvious to say that creating an I s P is not a small endeavor. It's a big, big challenge. So Dayton sought out investors to help fund his venture, and he secured one thousand dollars from a pair of them, Kevin O'Donnell and Read Slatkin, in the process. O'Donnell still

heads major investment initiatives to this day, working with Adam Street. Slatkin, who passed away in became infamous for running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. Now, if you are not familiar with that term, a Ponzi scheme is a way of perpetuating a cycle of investments that is in the long run unsustainable, And I'll give you a very

high level rundown on how it works. So let's say you're running an investment fund and you raise one thousand dollars from an initial round of investors using some sort of scheme. Doesn't matter what the scheme is, doesn't matter what you're telling people they're investing in. Maybe you've told everyone you're gonna sell marching band equipment to small towns in the Midwest. But you've got your initial investment of one hundred thousand dollars and you start living high off

the hog. You're spending money, but investors expect a return on the investments they put in, meaning you now have an obligation to try and not just pay them back, but pay them back on top of their investment to give them a profit, or at least make a payment to those investors. Except your whole scheme is faulty, either on purpose or just by circumstance. So instead you hold

a second round of investments. Let's say this time you're asking for two hundred thousand dollars, and you use some of that two dollars to pay off at least part of your first round of investors to kind of get them off your back. Meanwhile, you keep living high on the hog. You're still spending lots of money. But hey, now you owe money to that second round of investors, and potentially you still owe some money to the first round.

So then you hold another round of investment, this time maybe for a million dollars, and so on and so forth. And as you see, the scheme tends to get bigger over time, and eventually you hit a point where you're just not going to be able to keep up with it, and it all comes crashing down. Now. To really learn about this scheme and why it's called a Ponzi scheme, I highly recommend you check out a classic Stuff you Should Know episode titled How Ponzi Schemes Work. It published

originally way back in two thousand nine. It is a fantastic episode. Slatkin was running one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history, and many of his victims were celebrities. Slatkin was also a member of the Church of Scientology, with more than a few of his marks his targets also being fellow members. But hey, members of Scientology were used to handing over enormous amounts of cash to someone else. Not to learn more about that, I recommend checking out

the podcast Scientology Fair Game. It's incredibly well done and also just a trigger warning, has a lot of really upsetting stuff in it. Slatkin had been part of Scientology since the nineteen seventies, so in retrospect, slat kins involvement with the early days of earth Link is kind of a shameful past sort of thing, though I suspect at the time no one really knew about this particular m

O of his. He wasn't found out and prosecuted by the U S Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC until two thousand one, and whether earned honestly or through deception, slat can put forward some of the seed money that Dayton needed to get things moving. Dayton would start earth Link in California. Now. According to Wired, the company initially offered connections to the Internet at large through one of its ten modems. That's one zero, That's all he had.

This was inherently different from online service providers like Prodigy or a o L which, again we're mostly confining you

to the OSPs own self contained network. One of the big limitations of those OSPs, as I mentioned, is that you couldn't communicate between two of them to Typically there were some that would make arrangements with one another, but it meant that they had limited utility unless everyone you knew happened to be on the same osp The Internet really offered up a new opportunity to connect people and services no matter what network they were on, assuming that

network was in turn connected to the Internet itself and wasn't restricting access. That promise of the Internet, that ability to connect to practically limitless people and services, would become

a driving force for development in the nineteen nineties. It got a big boost starting in nine with the introduction of the Mosaic browser and the early days of the Worldwide Web, and so earth Link launched in nineteen, along with a few other competing I s p s, some of which came out before earth Link, some that came out around the same time, a couple that followed immediately after,

and then after that there was an explosion. Among those was another important I sp in our story called mind Spring. When we come back, I'm going to cover some early Internet history and the roles of I s p s in those early days, so that we get an understanding of what exactly the business here was. But first let's take a quick break. All right, we need to get an understanding of how the Internet works to grasp why

Internet service providers are even a thing. I mean, after all, shouldn't you just be able to connect right to the Internet and just skip that whole I s P. Thing. Well, let's get it sorted. But let me give you a warning. There are actually a lot of different ways to describe how the Internet works, even if you're doing it from a very high level. So this is just one way to describe the relationship of various uh entities that are

part of the Internet. So the first thing we need to establish is that the Internet is a network of networks. They are frequently referred to as autonomous systems or a s S. So network and autonomous system are essentially synonymous. So network is really a bunch of interconnected devices that can communicate with one another, either directly and dedicated lines of communication or through various communication hubs. So you've got your computers, some of which your servers, some of which

our clients. You've got your physical lines of communication. Because we're gonna skip over things like WiFi for right now, and you've got your switches and your routers that make sure that the proper connections form between machines. So when someone on computer A sends something to someone on computer B, the switches and routers make sure that the data from A goes to be and not to say computer F or every computer on the system. You can have a

network like this be completely self contained. It does not have to be part of the Internet, but you could connected to other networks like you could have these networks then connect to multiple other networks. However, as new networks join up and established connections to yet more networks, things start getting exponentially more complicated. If you are starting up a brand new computer network, establishing a direct line of communication with every other computer network that exists would be

practically impossible, right. I mean, maybe in the very early days of the commercial Internet you can manage this if you had enough resources, but today it would be almost impossible to do. Over time, we saw the development of what we would call the Internet backbone. Now, this describes a sort of nexus of data routes. All the physical cables, the switches, the routers through which data can travel to

get from one network to another. The early origins of the backbone date to the days when the Internet was almost exclusively the domain of the academic world. The National Science Foundation in the United States a k a. The n s F was instrumental in creating a major foundation for this backbone. Until nine, all of the data traveling across the NSF net was from universities and research facilities. There was no commercial connection to the Internet over the

nsfuh net at this point. And here's where things really got complicated. See, the n s F net was one network, but telecommunications companies were starting to build out their own networks, including those physical connections that link networks together. First they did so internally so that you had like the A, T and T internal network, and then later they started to connect with each other so that they could do data exchanges. NSF net agreed to carry commercial traffic across

its network connections to deliver to other networks. So it was acting as a conduit which would allow customers of network one communicate and send files or received files from people using you know, network number two. And it was

the birthplace of the Internet backbone. The big telecommunications companies building out their own miles of cable with switches and routers were creating kind of their own backbones, but these would become interconnected with the infrastructure of n s F net and other big companies and thus making the backbone

more robust. You can think of it as just a bunch of cables all twisting together to form an extra thick cable and there was a clear benefit to interconnecting these networks with one another, but there was also the question of how would these interconnections work From a business perspective. Building out infrastructure costs a lot of money, and those components have limitations on how much data they can handle at one time, as well as how an increasingly large

demand for services can cause congestion through a network. So there were questions about how networks would handle the exchange of data between one network and another. And we historically describe these networks that connect to one another in the form of tiers. That's t I, E R. So a Tier one network is really large, typically a global reach network that's interconnected, and it serves as part of the

key components of the Internet backbone. Just so you know, the definitions for the different tiers are a little bit loosey goosey, But essentially, a Tier one network does not have to pay for the privilege of sending data to or receiving data from other networks. It's called peering. A Tier two network has to pay for some transit privileges.

In other words, it has to pay some other networks for the privilege of being able to transfer data between the two, but it has agreements in place with a lot of other networks where it's the same sort of thing of peering, where it doesn't have to make those those transit payments. Then you have Tier three networks which do not have that level of cloud they have to

pay those transit fees. So let's say you've got a tier one network like a T and T. A T and T S network consists of millions and millions and millions of devices, including web servers, network switches, cables, traffic routers. This network is really huge. And if you've got two computers that are on the A T and T network, and all the connections between those two computers are essentially on a T and T S network, then you've got an intra network connection going on. Doesn't matter if they're

across the country from each other. If it's on that one network, the data never actually has to leave the provenance of a T and T in theory anyway. But let's say that you're on a device that connects to a T and T S network and you want to connect to a server that's on a different Tier one network, like one that's on Lumen Technologies network. Any data exchange is going to have to pass from one network to another.

So if you think of network connections like private roads, you're talking about going from one private community into another private community. But there's a lot of traffic that goes back and forth between these two huge entities, and figuring out how to charge for that would be a nightmare, particularly since you could see big shifts in the direction of data flow. And usually it all comes out as a wash anyway, with each network owing pretty much the

same amount to the other network. And so these Tier one networks have established these agreements called peering agreements with other Tier one networks. And what these agreements say essentially is that, yeah, I'll accept data from your network on my lines if you do the same for me, and we'll call it even and Stephen. To be a Tier one you've got to be big with a global or nearly global reach, and that's that sort of access is

way too grand for most networks. Tier two networks typically have a large reach, though not necessarily a global one, and they can have peering agreements with other Tier two

networks creating you know, regional access points. So in this case, if Tier two Network A and Tier two Network B are both connected to a regional access point, the same one data can travel up from a user on Network A, upstream to that regional access point, crossover to Network B, and go downstream to a target computer and there's no need for the data to go all the way up to the backbone in that case. But let's say you've got Tier two networks C and it's not connected to

that same regional access point. While in that case, the data from network AY has to travel up stream beyond that regional access point, further up the chain to the Internet backbone, then back down the backbone into network C and down to the destination. And there could be transit fees associated with that because the Tier two network has to interface with the Tier one networks that are associated with the backbone. But hey, there's more. We've got Tier

three networks as well. Now these include smaller, typically local I s p s like earth Link. These companies connect up to another network, either Tier two or Tier one, and they have to pay for the privilege to do so. In return, the Tier three network can send data to and received data from anywhere else on the Internet, and the way that they pass that cost on is through

the subscription services to the customers. And the reason you need an I s P is that you as an individual can't really go to a Tier two or a Tier one network and negotiate a direct connection to that network and transit fees so that you can tap into their physical infrastructure to operate across the Internet. At least, you can't do that unless you have what is known

in the technical world as a metric crap ton of money. Now, if you do have a metric crap ton of money, you might be able to manage it, but it would be wicked expensive. So the I s p s serve as a liaison between the end customer, whether it's a business or someone like me or you, and the infrastructure

of the Internet at large. The rates you pay your I s P might partly go to costs like transit fees if your I s P is Tier two or lower, And it could also go to funding more infrastructure in the future, or hey, it might just go to boosting profits and making shareholders happy. Let's be honest, a lot of the money is going to that. This arrangement shook out over the early years of the Internet. It wasn't

something that was planned out from the beginning. This had to form organically over those early years and things were still kind of influx when earth Link launched. In the company's ten modems would accept incoming calls from customers and then connect them with a network access point further upstream to tap into the Internet at large. Earth Link charged customers a fee to access the service, and part of earth links costs included those transit fees that it provided

in return for access to the Internet. And while we're on the subject of technical discussions, remember when I played that modem sound at the beginning of the show, You know this one. What the heck does that sound mean? Well, let's go through it a bit by bit. Now. The very first sound we hear is the modem effectively activating the phone line. It says, if you were to pick up a landline in any location. You start to hear the ringtone, then we hear the modem dial a number.

That number corresponds with whatever service you're dialing into. It could be a BBS, in which case you're dialing direct into a modem that connects to the BBS administrator's computer, or you could be dialing into an I s P, which then completes the connection to the Internet at large. Next follows that weird series of noises, and here's where

things get pretty interesting. Computers are digital. They run on binary signals, which consists of zeros and ones the old off and on switch, and you can think of a binary signal is really a bunch of discrete binary values. It's not like a sign wave. It's a bunch of zeros in one, so it looks more like little stair steps than uh and flat planes and things like that, rather than a curved line that is unbroken. But communication

over phone lines is analog, not binary, not digital. So the phone converts sound waves into an electrical signal with varying voltage, which is a constant signal, not a set of discrete values, and then the phone at the other end of the phone call takes this electric signal with varying voltage and converts it back into sound. Now, I'm not going to go into all of that and how that works because it's not important for our discussion, and

I've also covered in another episodes. But the modem's purpose is to take the digital signals of the computer and convert them into something that can pass through an analog transmission line. So it modulates the signal, coding it as sound, which in turn gets converted into the electrical signal with varying voltage. A modem on the opposite end receives this modulated signal and demodulates it back into binary digital information.

Years later, the f c C in the United States began to work on the transition of shutting down the analog phone network, which was largely obsolete, but at this point in the early nineties, it still was very much a thing. Okay, So getting back to the sound of the modem, the next couple of weird tones we hear represents that the two modems in question are agreeing on what speed they can actually work together in order to

do the next couple of steps. So they're setting the ground rules of how quickly they can go back and forth with each other. So in the good old days, he had modems with different amount of information that could be set by that modem per second. Oh hey, it's future Jonathan breaking into this episode to fix something that I said when I first recorded this particular episode that was wrong. So here's what I did say. I said that when earth Link launched, the standard modem speed at

the time was fifty bits per second. That part isn't correct, but it gets worse. But at the time that earth Link launched, the fast consumer modems that were on the market were capable of handling data at twenty eight point eight kilobits per second. Those were the fastest ones that were available at the time, which is not fast by

modern standards. And these were BAWD modems. And when I first sat down to record this episode, I made a common mistake, which was that I talked about bawd and bits per second as if they are the same thing, and they are not. So if you hear someone say a modem is undred baud, this does not mean that the modem tray submitted data at two point four kilobits

or two thousand, four hundred bits per second. In fact, hundred baud modems had a range of speeds from nine point six kill a bits per second all the way up to nineteen point two kill a bits per second. There were old modems that did top out at two thousand, four hundred bits per second, but they were not twenty four hundred bawd modems. They were actually either six hundred bawd or twelve hundred baud modems, so remember bawd and

bits per second are different. Also, while the top consumer modems of the time could reach speeds of twenty eight point eight kill a bits per second, it was possible to lease phone lines. Companies could do this and achieve speeds of up to fifty six kill a bits per second, but consumer modems would not reach those speeds until the late nineteen nineties. As you listen to the rest of this episode, I might trip up a bit on that, but I wanted to use this opportunity to address a

goof that I made early on. Anyway, at this point in the modem noise sequence, the two modems are figuring out what speed they can communicate so that they can set the rest of the rules. All right, pass Jonathan, take it away. The next few signals are a handshake between the two modems that set various parameters that dictate stuff like the data bit number and parody between the two modems. To get into all of that would be

very technical, we're just going to skip over it. Essentially, it's the rules by which the two modems will follow as they exchange information. Then there's a rate negotiation for how fast the modems will actually allow data to travel between them, and then the two modems establish a connection that allows for simultaneous communication, which means the modems can both send and receive data on the same line at

the same time. Assuming all that goes well, the connection is accepted, and you finally hear the sound of actual through it between the two modems before your modem speaker switches off, so you don't have to hear it the whole time you're on the Internet. Okay, that took a while, but I felt it was necessary to understand earth links business. When we come back, we'll pick back up with earth Link,

but first let's take another quick break now. As I mentioned, when earth Link launched in nine four, the Internet was in a rapid growth period and stuff like transit fees and peerage was still shaking out. Dayton's determination to have an I s P with good customer service proved to be a popular notion, and his little company began to grow steadily. In earth Link and the newly formed Netscape Communications Corporation signed a deal that would really help out.

Like earth Link, Netscape had launched in it had also introduced the mosaic Netscape browser, which quickly became the dominant web browser on the market, though we should also remember

this was a very small market by today's standards. Subsequently, the company would name the browser Netscape Navigator, and it was a commercial web browser, meaning customers would need to pay for it in order to install it on their machines, or, as was the case with earth Link, another company like an I s P, could purchase a license to offer the browser on either machines or installation software that customers

would then use. So you could be a computer manufacturer and make this deal and O E M in other words, and then sell the computers to customers and it would already have Netscape Navigator on it, or if you were earth Link, you would offer up an installation c D that would include the Netscape Navigator browser to make it really easy to connect to the World Wide Web and earth Link. Meanwhile, on the infrastructure side, earth Link made

a really shrewd move. Rather than building out banks of telephones connected to various telephone company networks across the United States, which would have been an administrative and maintenance nightmare to oversee, instead earth Link least capacity from existing networks, and a lot of these were networks that were stuff that wasn't handling your your standard phone conversation communications. They were instead networks that were dedicated to stuff like verifying credit card transactions.

So earth Link would lease those lines to serve as connection points for the Internet for their customers, routing incoming calls from customers to available leased lines on these other companies, And because the lines actually belonged to another company, earth Link wasn't the one responsible to keep up with maintenance on an increasingly complicated network. They were using exist sting

infrastructure that otherwise was being dormant. Earth Link also signed an agreement with a company called you u Net Technologies. You you Net was one of the first I s p s, having been founded in nineteen seven, so two years before commercial Internet traffic actually started crossing the NSF

net backbone. It was also one of the tier one networks, having built out a considerable infrastructure early on in the Internet days, you you net was one of the largest and fastest growing I s p s in the world. Earth Links agreement meant that earth Link would connect customers

to you you net phone lines. The agreement meant that earth Link could sign up customers for service and give those customers you you net dial up numbers, and in return, earth Link would pay you unt a fee to access that dial up number bank and this dramatically increased earth links reach, as you u net had access points across nearly one hundred cities in the United States. While earth Link was still physically really a regional I s P

mostly rooted out of the West Coast. Unit, by the way, has its own fascinating and complicated history, as it would go through a series of mergers and acquisitions over the years, and ultimately it would end up with Verizon, but that's a story for a different podcast. Oh and earth Link also did something that really resonated with its customers. So in the early days of the Internet, and this was back from the BBS days, the standard practice was for a company like an OSP or an I s P

to charge customers two fees. The first fee was a recurring service fee, like a monthly fee. That's what gave customers access to the provider's services. But then there was a second fee, usually an hourly fee, and the more time a customer spent connected to a service each month, the higher this fee would be. Now, in part, this was a measure to help deal with the potential problem of traffic congestion. If a service became really popular, the

demand for those services could outstrip its capacity. So if you've got ten phone lines and twelve people all want to connect to the Internet at the same time, you got a problem. So putting in an hourly fee would both maximize the revenue you were bringing in and act as a sort of limiting factor for individuals so that one person wouldn't take over an entire line by themselves, you know, like log into the service and just never log out. Well, that would be prohibitively expensive with the

hourly fee, so that helped prevent that from happening. So it's both for a traffic management purpose and a revenue generating purpose, and customers hated it because it meant feeling like you were paying for the same thing twice. Earth Link changed that by introducing a flat fee for its service, so customers would pay nineteen dollars per month to earth Link. In return, they could access the service whenever they wanted, for as long as they wanted, with no hour leafees.

Earth Link could do this because of those relationships that the company had been making with other telecommunications companies and other I s p s. As long as earth Link's capacity to make connections through its partners was ahead of demand, the flat fee would work just fine. By earth Link was really taking off, and that's when Sky Dayton would step down as CEO. He stayed on board as the chairman of earth Link, but the new CEO was Charles

Gary Betty. And while this isn't an episode about Dayton himself, I do find it interesting that Dayton has a bit of a history of founding companies, getting them up and running and on the precipice of becoming, you know, truly huge, and then he steps back and then he does it

all over again with a new company. And he reminds me of several other entrepreneurs who really excel in getting business ideas off the ground, but then they prefer to step away to launch something else that's new, because that's their real strong suit, and they'll hand the reins over to a different leader in order to foster the company into its next phase. So that was Gary Betty's role. When Gary Betty took over, earth Link had around half

a million subscribers. It was still largely considered a regional I SP but under Betty's leadership, earth Link would expand dramatically, and that would include scooping up other regional I s p s to extend its own reach, and it would have more than five million customers by two thousand seven. He also oversaw earth links transition from a private company

into a publicly traded one. Earth Link would hold its initial public offering in Sadly two thousand seven, Gary Betty would pass away at the age of forty nine after he developed cancer. And I'm sure we're going to cover more of Gary Betty's contributions in part two of this series, but it's time to switch gears for just a second now.

I haven't really mentioned Atlanta since the beginning of this episode, and yet earth Link has its headquarters in Atlanta today, and the reason for that lies with the totally different Internet service provider company I mentioned earlier, mind Spring. The history of earth Link and the history of mind Spring are very much tied together, as later down the road the two merge, so I thought I would end this episode by talking a little bit about mind Springs story.

The company's founder was Charles Brewer. Unlike Sky Dayton, Brewer went to university. He earned an NBA at Stanford's Graduate School of Business in fact, but like Dayton, Brewer encountered frustrations when he tried to connect to this new fangled thing called the Internet back in the early nineties, and like Dayton, his solution was to found a company that

would facilitate Internet can actions and remove those frustrations. So he founded mind Spring as a result, and reportedly in those early days his company had only eight modems and for the first four months of its operation it didn't even charge its customers. It also shared staff and equipment

with another I s P called Internet Atlanta. By mid mind Spring transitioned into a model that would charge customers, so now it actually had a way of making revenue and had worked out the various kinks during those first four months of you know, the technical aspects of being an i s P mind Spring had a reputation for having a really relaxed company culture with like no corporate dress code. Employees were encouraged to be creative where their workspaces.

The descriptions I've read of mind Spring made me think of the dot com startups that would pop up in the years following, with companies like spending a lot of time and attention and money on creating really interesting workspaces.

That's what mind Spring makes me think of. And like earth Link, mind Spring would form partnerships with various parties to extend its reach, its service, and to grow very quickly, and it would boost that by acquiring other companies, mostly small regional I s p s like Nando Net out of North Carolina i sp s. We're popping up all

over the place. There'd be thousands of them over the next few years, almost ten thousand by the time we get to the late nineties, and MindSpring having a headstart and a good amount of cash due to early investors and a popular service, was buying them up whenever it could. Now. In past episodes of tech Stuff, I've talked about how some companies expand by building out their services into new regions, into new territories and to new kinds of business, like

physically investing in building that stuff out. To do that is challenging, it is expensive, it is risky. But another way to expand very quickly is to just acquire other companies that already have a presence there, including competitors. And this is how companies like Comcast were able to grow so quickly. It wasn't that Comcast was laying cable to new communities. It was that Comcast was buying up local cable companies and then merging them into Comcasts overall business.

Mind Spring was effectively doing the same thing, largely in the southeastern United States. Mind Spring became a publicly traded company in nineteen six, so one year before earth Link would do the same. By the various mergers and acquisitions meant mind Spring had a total of more than one million subscribers in the United States, and it was in late nine that mind Spring and earth Link announced an intention for the two companies to merge into a new

single company. This company would keep the earth Link name, but it would have its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, so the mind Spring headquarters would become the earth Link headquarters. The mind Spring stock symbol of MSP e G would phase out, and the new company would have the trading

symbol e l n K for earth Link. The combined company would be one of the largest I s p s in the world when the merger was complete, the second largest, in fact, just behind America Online, which had pivoted from being an online service provider to a true Internet service provider. In our next episode, we'll learn more about earth links fate in the two thousand's, how DSL and cable would change the game, and what would lead various news outlets to proclaim that earth Link was dead.

In news flash, It's not dead. I guess it was only mostly dead because it's still around today. But that will wait for the next full Tech Stuff episode. Now, remember tomorrow's episode, We're going to have another dollarp of tech news. I'm going to give you a quick rundown of some of the headlines of what's going on in

tech today. Join me then, and if you have a suggestion for topics that I should cover on Future Tech Stuff EPI zodes, whether they're a specific technology, a company, a person, or maybe a trend in tech or anything like that, reach out to me. The best ways to use Twitter to handle this tech stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is

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