I started my TCP life (moving from broadcast engineering) back in about '94ish. I was in Yakima, WA and took care of the 9 working modems for Wolfe.net after being on connected.com and teleport.com (Portland, OR). My girlfriend (later my wife), who I met online via the unix talk command got hired with me by Wolfe and moved to Seattle. We worked with them for a few years during the dial-up days and moved on to one of their customers where we had massive growth and 2.5Gb/s of pipe in 1998 (yes, it was pr0n.) Then I went to AMZN and got their first netblock after haggling with ARIN at a BOF at NANOG 19 in Atlanta. See back then, AMZN could only justify a /22 since we were just a website. Many years later I landed in corporate aerospace and will likely die here at my keyboard.
Anyway, now when the youngins ask me technical TCP/IP questions I like to start off with, "Well, back when we were building the Internet..." On Sun, Nov 12, 2023 at 7:49 AM Dave Taht via Nnagain < nnag...@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote: > Aside from me pinning the start of the bubble closer to 1992 when > commercial activity was allowed, and M&A for ISPs at insane valuations > per subscriber by 1995 (I had co-founded an ISP in 93, but try as I > might I cannot remember if it peaked at 50 or 60x1 by 1996 (?) and > crashed by 97 (?)), this was a whacking good read, seems accurate, and > moves to comparing it across that to the present day AI bubble. > > https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/lessons-from-history-the-rise-and > > In the end we sold (my ISP, founded 93) icanect for 3 cents on the > dollar in 99, and I lost my shirt (not for the first time) on it, only > to move into embedded Linux (Montavista) after the enormous pop > redhat's IPO had had in 99. The company I was part of slightly prior > (Mediaplex) went public December 12, 1999 and cracked 100/share, only > to crash by march, 2000 to half the IPO price (around $7 as I recall), > wiping out everyone that had not vested yet. I lost my shirt again on > that and Montavista too and decided I would avoid VCs henceforth. > > I am always interested in anecdotal reports of personal events in this > increasingly murky past, and in trying to fact check the above link. > > So much fiber got laid by 2000 that it is often claimed that it was at > least a decade before it was used up, (the article says only 2.7% was > in use by 2002) and I have always wondered how much dark, broken, > inaccessible fiber remains that nobody knows where it even is anymore > due to many lost databases. I hear horror stories... > > The article also focuses solely on the us sector, and I am wondering > what it looked like worldwide. > > I believed in the 90s we were seeing major productivity gains. The > present expansion of the internet in my mind should not be much > associated with "productivity gains", as, imho, reducing the general > population to two thumbs and a 4 inch screen strikes me as an enormous > step backwards. > > (I have a bad habit of cross posting my mails to where older denizens > of the internet reside, sorry! If you end up posting to one of my > lists I will add a sender allows filter for you) > -- > :( My old R&D campus is up for sale: https://tinyurl.com/yurtlab > Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos > _______________________________________________ > Nnagain mailing list > nnag...@lists.bufferbloat.net > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain > -- -- Joe Hamelin, W7COM, Tulalip, WA, 360-474-7474
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