Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech and I thought today
Speaker 1: we could talk about a tech company that has its
Speaker 1: headquarters in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, though that's not
Speaker 1: where our story will begin. And it's a company that,
Speaker 1: for the first few years of its existence, made customers
Speaker 1: get cozy with the following sound. Yep, that's the sound
Speaker 1: of a dial up modem making a connection with another modem.
Speaker 1: And the company is earth Link, which is very much
Speaker 1: an active company today, though that might surprise some of
Speaker 1: you who might think that it had its heyday and
Speaker 1: then just faded into obscurity. Nope, it's still here. I
Speaker 1: passed the building sometimes here in Atlanta. So we're going
Speaker 1: to learn about the history of earth Link, what the
Speaker 1: company does, and we're gonna learn a bit about how
Speaker 1: the Internet works and dial up modems as well, because heck,
Speaker 1: this is tech stuff. Also because we're covering so much stuff,
Speaker 1: we're looking at a couple of episodes here, my favorite,
Speaker 1: but to tell the story of earth Link will also
Speaker 1: have to dive into a lot of other stuff to
Speaker 1: to really understand what's going on. So we're going to have,
Speaker 1: like I said, a refresher on how the Internet works
Speaker 1: from a structural standpoint. I'm not going to get into
Speaker 1: protocols or any of that, but more of a high
Speaker 1: level look at how the Internet works. And we're going
Speaker 1: to understand what Internet service providers do and why they're
Speaker 1: a necessity for the vast majority of us. And we'll
Speaker 1: also learn about a company that competed with earth Link
Speaker 1: early on and why that company is the reason that
Speaker 1: earth Link has its HQ in Atlanta. So this might take,
Speaker 1: you know, like I said, a couple of episodes to
Speaker 1: cover everything, but it's a great way to learn about
Speaker 1: the Internet in general and the gradual shift to broadband
Speaker 1: methods of connecting to the Internet. Now, our story begins
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies with a fellow named Sky Dylan Dayton.
Speaker 1: I was going to make a Sky is the Limit
Speaker 1: joke here, but if you do even a cursory Internet
Speaker 1: search for Sky Dayton and that's d A Y T
Speaker 1: O N, you will see that I have been beaten
Speaker 1: by the punch by hang on. Let me check my notes. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: looks like everybody, So I'm gonna spare you and Mr
Speaker 1: Dayton the hacky pun this time. Dayton was born in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one in New York City. His family relocated
Speaker 1: to Los Angeles when he was a bebe and his
Speaker 1: parents were both artists. His father, Wendell Dayton, was a
Speaker 1: sculptor and his mother, Alice DeWitt, was a musician poet.
Speaker 1: Alice's father, David DeWitt, was an IBM fellow and appointed
Speaker 1: position with an IBM that marks distinguished achievement at the company.
Speaker 1: And so now we begin our tale. Sky's parents relocated
Speaker 1: from New York to Los Angeles in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: and they would divorce in nineteen seventy five, and they
Speaker 1: shared custody of young Sky. Wendell Dayton took on jobs
Speaker 1: as a carpenter to earn money for Sky's education. And
Speaker 1: side note, Wendell's story is actually a pretty incredible one.
Speaker 1: He made really interesting sculptures that were reflective of his
Speaker 1: time in New York City. They kind of grew out
Speaker 1: of artistic movements that were prevalent in New York City
Speaker 1: in the seventies. And late sixties, but that unfortunately meant
Speaker 1: that they didn't really mesh with the artistic movements that
Speaker 1: were prevalent in Los Angeles. There was a different kind
Speaker 1: of artistic philosophy in that part of the country. In addition,
Speaker 1: Wendell really hated submitting his art to galleries. He was
Speaker 1: reluctant to do it. It caused him a lot of anxiety,
Speaker 1: so he largely went unrecognized for his work until he
Speaker 1: got a big break in when he was eighty years
Speaker 1: old and a gallery held an exhibit that showed off
Speaker 1: his work from like six decades of his sculpture. He
Speaker 1: passed away in twenty nineteen. I can't find much information
Speaker 1: about Alice DeWitt, which really is a shame. I find
Speaker 1: references to her being a poet and a dancer in
Speaker 1: addition to being a musician, but it's hard to track
Speaker 1: down specifics, and it's quite possible that I'm just looking
Speaker 1: in the wrong places. But I find it's sad that
Speaker 1: I can't find out much about her as opposed to
Speaker 1: finding full articles about Wendel. As for David DeWitt, it's
Speaker 1: important to note this is not the same David DeWitt
Speaker 1: who is a pioneer with database technology Ease and is
Speaker 1: a technical fellow with Microsoft. The David DeWitt and Sky's
Speaker 1: family became an IBM fellow in nineteen seventy, and that
Speaker 1: timeline just doesn't work out with the Microsoft technical fellow
Speaker 1: David DeWitt, who got his PhD in the mid seventies.
Speaker 1: I can't find much more information about David DeWitt, but
Speaker 1: I know that Sky Dayton has written about visiting his
Speaker 1: grandfather's office in Palo Alto, California as a child and
Speaker 1: being introduced to technology around that time. Not long after
Speaker 1: that visit with his grandfather, Sky got his first computer,
Speaker 1: which was a Sinclair z X eight e one. These
Speaker 1: computers came from Dundee, Scotland, and they were made by
Speaker 1: time X, the watch company. Sky was nine years old
Speaker 1: at the time, so that puts the set around nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty and honestly, I'm kind of shocked that that was
Speaker 1: his first computer. I would have pegged it as an
Speaker 1: Apple too, being out of California in the early eighties,
Speaker 1: that would have been the right kind of timing that
Speaker 1: to be the first computer, especially since the Sinclair computers
Speaker 1: were not nearly as well known here in the States
Speaker 1: as they were in Europe. Anyway, back to our story.
Speaker 1: At some point in his childhood, Sky's parents enrolled him
Speaker 1: in the Delphian School, which is a private boarding school
Speaker 1: in Oregon. The school covers grades kindergarten through twelve, and
Speaker 1: they had fewer than three hundred students, so the students
Speaker 1: would actually live at the school and go to school
Speaker 1: and stay there. And the school doesn't follow the same
Speaker 1: sort of curricula and structure as public schools in the
Speaker 1: United States. From what I understand, it seems like students
Speaker 1: really stay on a subject until they have shown an
Speaker 1: understanding and mastery of that subject, rather than having to
Speaker 1: move on at a set time. So, for example, if
Speaker 1: you were particularly strong in the field of algebra, you
Speaker 1: might complete that course before a school year is up
Speaker 1: and then move on to the next course in mathematics
Speaker 1: or flip wise, if you found it particularly challenging, you
Speaker 1: might just stick with algebra a little bit longer in
Speaker 1: order to reach that level of understanding. There wasn't like
Speaker 1: at this arbitrary date you must move on or be
Speaker 1: held back. Sky Dayton graduated from the Delphian School in
Speaker 1: nine and rather than apply to college, he decided to
Speaker 1: strike out into business, and one early entrepreneurial endeavor was
Speaker 1: a coffee shop and art gallery that he co founded
Speaker 1: with a friend. The name of the shop was Cafe Mocha.
Speaker 1: In nineteen two, Dayton would co found another business with
Speaker 1: a friend, a different friend, and this business was a
Speaker 1: design company that created graphics and layouts for advertising campaigns,
Speaker 1: and it was called Dayton Slash Walker Design. But something
Speaker 1: else was starting to consume Sky's attention. See Sky wanted
Speaker 1: to connect to the Internet. In the nineteen eighties, there
Speaker 1: was a growing culture of bulletin board systems or bbs is.
Speaker 1: And this is not Internet, but it's similar, And here's
Speaker 1: how they would work. Someone would set up a computer
Speaker 1: to act as a bulletin board, to host the bulletin board,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of like a web server, except
Speaker 1: this approach had a computer standing as its own little island,
Speaker 1: and it would host stuff like message boards and maybe
Speaker 1: some files. And the bbs would have a specific phone
Speaker 1: number associated with it, or maybe a small bank of
Speaker 1: phone numbers, and that would allow people to dial directly
Speaker 1: into the computer. So there are no other connections here.
Speaker 1: It's computer to computer connections. And computer owners with a
Speaker 1: dial up modem would use their modem to call the
Speaker 1: BBS number. I'll get into the process of what happens
Speaker 1: with dial up modems a little bit later in this episode,
Speaker 1: but essentially what happens is that the user and the
Speaker 1: BBS computer connect to each other and then they can
Speaker 1: interact with the actual stuff that's on the BBS. By
Speaker 1: the early nine nineties, we were starting to see this
Speaker 1: transition into actual Internet services. The Internet had already been
Speaker 1: a thing for a while, but only a small percentage
Speaker 1: of folks in the general population even knew about it.
Speaker 1: It was largely the domain no pun intended of academia
Speaker 1: and some research facilities, and then a few government divisions,
Speaker 1: particularly the military. And keep in mind that is when
Speaker 1: Tim berners Lee would really start working on the earliest
Speaker 1: web pages. Is typically when people say that he built
Speaker 1: the first one. So this is really pre Worldwide Web
Speaker 1: that hadn't really taken off yet. Rather than connect to
Speaker 1: the Worldwide Web, people were using the Internet to do
Speaker 1: stuff like send emails or use FTP as in File
Speaker 1: Transfer Protocol, or maybe use tell net, which is a
Speaker 1: way to create a virtual terminal connection between multiple machines
Speaker 1: for the purposes of text based communication. The main method
Speaker 1: of connecting to theseervices was through dial up modems, but
Speaker 1: the process of connecting wasn't always a smooth one. The
Speaker 1: early online service providers and Internet service providers were essentially
Speaker 1: working out the bugs in the system, and it often
Speaker 1: meant that it could take a long time to connect,
Speaker 1: or connections would drop, or sometimes you would lose stuff
Speaker 1: in mid transfer. Online service providers like America Online, Prodigy,
Speaker 1: and compu Serve would allow users to access a suite
Speaker 1: of services and features that were contained within those services,
Speaker 1: but they had little or sometimes no access to the
Speaker 1: Internet at large, So it's more like logging into a
Speaker 1: glorified bulletin board system, a big one, but one that
Speaker 1: still had barriers, and it usually meant that if you
Speaker 1: were a customer of one and your buddy was a
Speaker 1: customer of another one, you couldn't send messages to each
Speaker 1: other because you were confined by the barriers of that service.
Speaker 1: Internet service providers, which gave access to the Internet at
Speaker 1: large were not that common yet. Then there was the
Speaker 1: world widely recognized as the first commercial I s P.
Speaker 1: Not universally recognized as such, but there are a lot
Speaker 1: of people who argue it was and that launched in
Speaker 1: There were a couple of others, but they were pretty
Speaker 1: limited and Sky Dayton found the experience of connecting to
Speaker 1: the Internet really irritating, and to make matters worse, the
Speaker 1: company he was using didn't have a good customer service department.
Speaker 1: This kind of got the wheels turning in Sky's head.
Speaker 1: Right around nine, he started thinking about launching his own
Speaker 1: Internet service provider company, and he wanted to have more
Speaker 1: of a focus on customer service. I think it's pretty
Speaker 1: obvious to say that creating an I s P is
Speaker 1: not a small endeavor. It's a big, big challenge. So
Speaker 1: Dayton sought out investors to help fund his venture, and
Speaker 1: he secured one thousand dollars from a pair of them,
Speaker 1: Kevin O'Donnell and Read Slatkin, in the process. O'Donnell still
Speaker 1: heads major investment initiatives to this day, working with Adam Street. Slatkin,
Speaker 1: who passed away in became infamous for running one of
Speaker 1: the largest Ponzi schemes in history. Now, if you are
Speaker 1: not familiar with that term, a Ponzi scheme is a
Speaker 1: way of perpetuating a cycle of investments that is in
Speaker 1: the long run unsustainable, And I'll give you a very
Speaker 1: high level rundown on how it works. So let's say
Speaker 1: you're running an investment fund and you raise one thousand
Speaker 1: dollars from an initial round of investors using some sort
Speaker 1: of scheme. Doesn't matter what the scheme is, doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what you're telling people they're investing in. Maybe you've told
Speaker 1: everyone you're gonna sell marching band equipment to small towns
Speaker 1: in the Midwest. But you've got your initial investment of
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars and you start living high off
Speaker 1: the hog. You're spending money, but investors expect a return
Speaker 1: on the investments they put in, meaning you now have
Speaker 1: an obligation to try and not just pay them back,
Speaker 1: but pay them back on top of their investment to
Speaker 1: give them a profit, or at least make a payment
Speaker 1: to those investors. Except your whole scheme is faulty, either
Speaker 1: on purpose or just by circumstance. So instead you hold
Speaker 1: a second round of investments. Let's say this time you're
Speaker 1: asking for two hundred thousand dollars, and you use some
Speaker 1: of that two dollars to pay off at least part
Speaker 1: of your first round of investors to kind of get
Speaker 1: them off your back. Meanwhile, you keep living high on
Speaker 1: the hog. You're still spending lots of money. But hey,
Speaker 1: now you owe money to that second round of investors,
Speaker 1: and potentially you still owe some money to the first round.
Speaker 1: So then you hold another round of investment, this time
Speaker 1: maybe for a million dollars, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And as you see, the scheme tends to get bigger
Speaker 1: over time, and eventually you hit a point where you're
Speaker 1: just not going to be able to keep up with it,
Speaker 1: and it all comes crashing down. Now. To really learn
Speaker 1: about this scheme and why it's called a Ponzi scheme,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend you check out a classic Stuff you
Speaker 1: Should Know episode titled How Ponzi Schemes Work. It published
Speaker 1: originally way back in two thousand nine. It is a
Speaker 1: fantastic episode. Slatkin was running one of the biggest Ponzi
Speaker 1: schemes in history, and many of his victims were celebrities.
Speaker 1: Slatkin was also a member of the Church of Scientology,
Speaker 1: with more than a few of his marks his targets
Speaker 1: also being fellow members. But hey, members of Scientology were
Speaker 1: used to handing over enormous amounts of cash to someone else.
Speaker 1: Not to learn more about that, I recommend checking out
Speaker 1: the podcast Scientology Fair Game. It's incredibly well done and
Speaker 1: also just a trigger warning, has a lot of really
Speaker 1: upsetting stuff in it. Slatkin had been part of Scientology
Speaker 1: since the nineteen seventies, so in retrospect, slat kins involvement
Speaker 1: with the early days of earth Link is kind of
Speaker 1: a shameful past sort of thing, though I suspect at
Speaker 1: the time no one really knew about this particular m
Speaker 1: O of his. He wasn't found out and prosecuted by
Speaker 1: the U S Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC until
Speaker 1: two thousand one, and whether earned honestly or through deception,
Speaker 1: slat can put forward some of the seed money that
Speaker 1: Dayton needed to get things moving. Dayton would start earth
Speaker 1: Link in California. Now. According to Wired, the company initially
Speaker 1: offered connections to the Internet at large through one of
Speaker 1: its ten modems. That's one zero, That's all he had.
Speaker 1: This was inherently different from online service providers like Prodigy
Speaker 1: or a o L which, again we're mostly confining you
Speaker 1: to the OSPs own self contained network. One of the
Speaker 1: big limitations of those OSPs, as I mentioned, is that
Speaker 1: you couldn't communicate between two of them to Typically there
Speaker 1: were some that would make arrangements with one another, but
Speaker 1: it meant that they had limited utility unless everyone you
Speaker 1: knew happened to be on the same osp The Internet
Speaker 1: really offered up a new opportunity to connect people and
Speaker 1: services no matter what network they were on, assuming that
Speaker 1: network was in turn connected to the Internet itself and
Speaker 1: wasn't restricting access. That promise of the Internet, that ability
Speaker 1: to connect to practically limitless people and services, would become
Speaker 1: a driving force for development in the nineteen nineties. It
Speaker 1: got a big boost starting in nine with the introduction
Speaker 1: of the Mosaic browser and the early days of the
Speaker 1: Worldwide Web, and so earth Link launched in nineteen, along
Speaker 1: with a few other competing I s p s, some
Speaker 1: of which came out before earth Link, some that came
Speaker 1: out around the same time, a couple that followed immediately after,
Speaker 1: and then after that there was an explosion. Among those
Speaker 1: was another important I sp in our story called mind Spring.
Speaker 1: When we come back, I'm going to cover some early
Speaker 1: Internet history and the roles of I s p s
Speaker 1: in those early days, so that we get an understanding
Speaker 1: of what exactly the business here was. But first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break. All right, we need to get
Speaker 1: an understanding of how the Internet works to grasp why
Speaker 1: Internet service providers are even a thing. I mean, after all,
Speaker 1: shouldn't you just be able to connect right to the
Speaker 1: Internet and just skip that whole I s P. Thing. Well,
Speaker 1: let's get it sorted. But let me give you a warning.
Speaker 1: There are actually a lot of different ways to describe
Speaker 1: how the Internet works, even if you're doing it from
Speaker 1: a very high level. So this is just one way
Speaker 1: to describe the relationship of various uh entities that are
Speaker 1: part of the Internet. So the first thing we need
Speaker 1: to establish is that the Internet is a network of networks.
Speaker 1: They are frequently referred to as autonomous systems or a
Speaker 1: s S. So network and autonomous system are essentially synonymous.
Speaker 1: So network is really a bunch of interconnected devices that
Speaker 1: can communicate with one another, either directly and dedicated lines
Speaker 1: of communication or through various communication hubs. So you've got
Speaker 1: your computers, some of which your servers, some of which
Speaker 1: our clients. You've got your physical lines of communication. Because
Speaker 1: we're gonna skip over things like WiFi for right now,
Speaker 1: and you've got your switches and your routers that make
Speaker 1: sure that the proper connections form between machines. So when
Speaker 1: someone on computer A sends something to someone on computer B,
Speaker 1: the switches and routers make sure that the data from
Speaker 1: A goes to be and not to say computer F
Speaker 1: or every computer on the system. You can have a
Speaker 1: network like this be completely self contained. It does not
Speaker 1: have to be part of the Internet, but you could
Speaker 1: connected to other networks like you could have these networks
Speaker 1: then connect to multiple other networks. However, as new networks
Speaker 1: join up and established connections to yet more networks, things
Speaker 1: start getting exponentially more complicated. If you are starting up
Speaker 1: a brand new computer network, establishing a direct line of
Speaker 1: communication with every other computer network that exists would be
Speaker 1: practically impossible, right. I mean, maybe in the very early
Speaker 1: days of the commercial Internet you can manage this if
Speaker 1: you had enough resources, but today it would be almost
Speaker 1: impossible to do. Over time, we saw the development of
Speaker 1: what we would call the Internet backbone. Now, this describes
Speaker 1: a sort of nexus of data routes. All the physical cables,
Speaker 1: the switches, the routers through which data can travel to
Speaker 1: get from one network to another. The early origins of
Speaker 1: the backbone date to the days when the Internet was
Speaker 1: almost exclusively the domain of the academic world. The National
Speaker 1: Science Foundation in the United States a k a. The
Speaker 1: n s F was instrumental in creating a major foundation
Speaker 1: for this backbone. Until nine, all of the data traveling
Speaker 1: across the NSF net was from universities and research facilities.
Speaker 1: There was no commercial connection to the Internet over the
Speaker 1: nsfuh net at this point. And here's where things really
Speaker 1: got complicated. See, the n s F net was one network,
Speaker 1: but telecommunications companies were starting to build out their own networks,
Speaker 1: including those physical connections that link networks together. First they
Speaker 1: did so internally so that you had like the A,
Speaker 1: T and T internal network, and then later they started
Speaker 1: to connect with each other so that they could do
Speaker 1: data exchanges. NSF net agreed to carry commercial traffic across
Speaker 1: its network connections to deliver to other networks. So it
Speaker 1: was acting as a conduit which would allow customers of
Speaker 1: network one communicate and send files or received files from
Speaker 1: people using you know, network number two. And it was
Speaker 1: the birthplace of the Internet backbone. The big telecommunications companies
Speaker 1: building out their own miles of cable with switches and
Speaker 1: routers were creating kind of their own backbones, but these
Speaker 1: would become interconnected with the infrastructure of n s F
Speaker 1: net and other big companies and thus making the backbone
Speaker 1: more robust. You can think of it as just a
Speaker 1: bunch of cables all twisting together to form an extra
Speaker 1: thick cable and there was a clear benefit to interconnecting
Speaker 1: these networks with one another, but there was also the
Speaker 1: question of how would these interconnections work From a business perspective.
Speaker 1: Building out infrastructure costs a lot of money, and those
Speaker 1: components have limitations on how much data they can handle
Speaker 1: at one time, as well as how an increasingly large
Speaker 1: demand for services can cause congestion through a network. So
Speaker 1: there were questions about how networks would handle the exchange
Speaker 1: of data between one network and another. And we historically
Speaker 1: describe these networks that connect to one another in the
Speaker 1: form of tiers. That's t I, E R. So a
Speaker 1: Tier one network is really large, typically a global reach
Speaker 1: network that's interconnected, and it serves as part of the
Speaker 1: key components of the Internet backbone. Just so you know,
Speaker 1: the definitions for the different tiers are a little bit
Speaker 1: loosey goosey, But essentially, a Tier one network does not
Speaker 1: have to pay for the privilege of sending data to
Speaker 1: or receiving data from other networks. It's called peering. A
Speaker 1: Tier two network has to pay for some transit privileges.
Speaker 1: In other words, it has to pay some other networks
Speaker 1: for the privilege of being able to transfer data between
Speaker 1: the two, but it has agreements in place with a
Speaker 1: lot of other networks where it's the same sort of
Speaker 1: thing of peering, where it doesn't have to make those
Speaker 1: those transit payments. Then you have Tier three networks which
Speaker 1: do not have that level of cloud they have to
Speaker 1: pay those transit fees. So let's say you've got a
Speaker 1: tier one network like a T and T. A T
Speaker 1: and T S network consists of millions and millions and
Speaker 1: millions of devices, including web servers, network switches, cables, traffic routers.
Speaker 1: This network is really huge. And if you've got two
Speaker 1: computers that are on the A T and T network,
Speaker 1: and all the connections between those two computers are essentially
Speaker 1: on a T and T S network, then you've got
Speaker 1: an intra network connection going on. Doesn't matter if they're
Speaker 1: across the country from each other. If it's on that
Speaker 1: one network, the data never actually has to leave the
Speaker 1: provenance of a T and T in theory anyway. But
Speaker 1: let's say that you're on a device that connects to
Speaker 1: a T and T S network and you want to
Speaker 1: connect to a server that's on a different Tier one network,
Speaker 1: like one that's on Lumen Technologies network. Any data exchange
Speaker 1: is going to have to pass from one network to another.
Speaker 1: So if you think of network connections like private roads,
Speaker 1: you're talking about going from one private community into another
Speaker 1: private community. But there's a lot of traffic that goes
Speaker 1: back and forth between these two huge entities, and figuring
Speaker 1: out how to charge for that would be a nightmare,
Speaker 1: particularly since you could see big shifts in the direction
Speaker 1: of data flow. And usually it all comes out as
Speaker 1: a wash anyway, with each network owing pretty much the
Speaker 1: same amount to the other network. And so these Tier
Speaker 1: one networks have established these agreements called peering agreements with
Speaker 1: other Tier one networks. And what these agreements say essentially
Speaker 1: is that, yeah, I'll accept data from your network on
Speaker 1: my lines if you do the same for me, and
Speaker 1: we'll call it even and Stephen. To be a Tier
Speaker 1: one you've got to be big with a global or
Speaker 1: nearly global reach, and that's that sort of access is
Speaker 1: way too grand for most networks. Tier two networks typically
Speaker 1: have a large reach, though not necessarily a global one,
Speaker 1: and they can have peering agreements with other Tier two
Speaker 1: networks creating you know, regional access points. So in this case,
Speaker 1: if Tier two Network A and Tier two Network B
Speaker 1: are both connected to a regional access point, the same
Speaker 1: one data can travel up from a user on Network A,
Speaker 1: upstream to that regional access point, crossover to Network B,
Speaker 1: and go downstream to a target computer and there's no
Speaker 1: need for the data to go all the way up
Speaker 1: to the backbone in that case. But let's say you've
Speaker 1: got Tier two networks C and it's not connected to
Speaker 1: that same regional access point. While in that case, the
Speaker 1: data from network AY has to travel up stream beyond
Speaker 1: that regional access point, further up the chain to the
Speaker 1: Internet backbone, then back down the backbone into network C
Speaker 1: and down to the destination. And there could be transit
Speaker 1: fees associated with that because the Tier two network has
Speaker 1: to interface with the Tier one networks that are associated
Speaker 1: with the backbone. But hey, there's more. We've got Tier
Speaker 1: three networks as well. Now these include smaller, typically local
Speaker 1: I s p s like earth Link. These companies connect
Speaker 1: up to another network, either Tier two or Tier one,
Speaker 1: and they have to pay for the privilege to do so.
Speaker 1: In return, the Tier three network can send data to
Speaker 1: and received data from anywhere else on the Internet, and
Speaker 1: the way that they pass that cost on is through
Speaker 1: the subscription services to the customers. And the reason you
Speaker 1: need an I s P is that you as an
Speaker 1: individual can't really go to a Tier two or a
Speaker 1: Tier one network and negotiate a direct connection to that
Speaker 1: network and transit fees so that you can tap into
Speaker 1: their physical infrastructure to operate across the Internet. At least,
Speaker 1: you can't do that unless you have what is known
Speaker 1: in the technical world as a metric crap ton of money. Now,
Speaker 1: if you do have a metric crap ton of money,
Speaker 1: you might be able to manage it, but it would
Speaker 1: be wicked expensive. So the I s p s serve
Speaker 1: as a liaison between the end customer, whether it's a
Speaker 1: business or someone like me or you, and the infrastructure
Speaker 1: of the Internet at large. The rates you pay your
Speaker 1: I s P might partly go to costs like transit
Speaker 1: fees if your I s P is Tier two or lower,
Speaker 1: And it could also go to funding more infrastructure in
Speaker 1: the future, or hey, it might just go to boosting
Speaker 1: profits and making shareholders happy. Let's be honest, a lot
Speaker 1: of the money is going to that. This arrangement shook
Speaker 1: out over the early years of the Internet. It wasn't
Speaker 1: something that was planned out from the beginning. This had
Speaker 1: to form organically over those early years and things were
Speaker 1: still kind of influx when earth Link launched. In the
Speaker 1: company's ten modems would accept incoming calls from customers and
Speaker 1: then connect them with a network access point further upstream
Speaker 1: to tap into the Internet at large. Earth Link charged
Speaker 1: customers a fee to access the service, and part of
Speaker 1: earth links costs included those transit fees that it provided
Speaker 1: in return for access to the Internet. And while we're
Speaker 1: on the subject of technical discussions, remember when I played
Speaker 1: that modem sound at the beginning of the show, You
Speaker 1: know this one. What the heck does that sound mean? Well,
Speaker 1: let's go through it a bit by bit. Now. The
Speaker 1: very first sound we hear is the modem effectively activating
Speaker 1: the phone line. It says, if you were to pick
Speaker 1: up a landline in any location. You start to hear
Speaker 1: the ringtone, then we hear the modem dial a number.
Speaker 1: That number corresponds with whatever service you're dialing into. It
Speaker 1: could be a BBS, in which case you're dialing direct
Speaker 1: into a modem that connects to the BBS administrator's computer,
Speaker 1: or you could be dialing into an I s P,
Speaker 1: which then completes the connection to the Internet at large.
Speaker 1: Next follows that weird series of noises, and here's where
Speaker 1: things get pretty interesting. Computers are digital. They run on
Speaker 1: binary signals, which consists of zeros and ones the old
Speaker 1: off and on switch, and you can think of a
Speaker 1: binary signal is really a bunch of discrete binary values.
Speaker 1: It's not like a sign wave. It's a bunch of
Speaker 1: zeros in one, so it looks more like little stair
Speaker 1: steps than uh and flat planes and things like that,
Speaker 1: rather than a curved line that is unbroken. But communication
Speaker 1: over phone lines is analog, not binary, not digital. So
Speaker 1: the phone converts sound waves into an electrical signal with
Speaker 1: varying voltage, which is a constant signal, not a set
Speaker 1: of discrete values, and then the phone at the other
Speaker 1: end of the phone call takes this electric signal with
Speaker 1: varying voltage and converts it back into sound. Now, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to go into all of that and how
Speaker 1: that works because it's not important for our discussion, and
Speaker 1: I've also covered in another episodes. But the modem's purpose
Speaker 1: is to take the digital signals of the computer and
Speaker 1: convert them into something that can pass through an analog
Speaker 1: transmission line. So it modulates the signal, coding it as sound,
Speaker 1: which in turn gets converted into the electrical signal with
Speaker 1: varying voltage. A modem on the opposite end receives this
Speaker 1: modulated signal and demodulates it back into binary digital information.
Speaker 1: Years later, the f c C in the United States
Speaker 1: began to work on the transition of shutting down the
Speaker 1: analog phone network, which was largely obsolete, but at this
Speaker 1: point in the early nineties, it still was very much
Speaker 1: a thing. Okay, So getting back to the sound of
Speaker 1: the modem, the next couple of weird tones we hear
Speaker 1: represents that the two modems in question are agreeing on
Speaker 1: what speed they can actually work together in order to
Speaker 1: do the next couple of steps. So they're setting the
Speaker 1: ground rules of how quickly they can go back and
Speaker 1: forth with each other. So in the good old days,
Speaker 1: he had modems with different amount of information that could
Speaker 1: be set by that modem per second. Oh hey, it's
Speaker 1: future Jonathan breaking into this episode to fix something that
Speaker 1: I said when I first recorded this particular episode that
Speaker 1: was wrong. So here's what I did say. I said
Speaker 1: that when earth Link launched, the standard modem speed at
Speaker 1: the time was fifty bits per second. That part isn't correct,
Speaker 1: but it gets worse. But at the time that earth
Speaker 1: Link launched, the fast consumer modems that were on the
Speaker 1: market were capable of handling data at twenty eight point
Speaker 1: eight kilobits per second. Those were the fastest ones that
Speaker 1: were available at the time, which is not fast by
Speaker 1: modern standards. And these were BAWD modems. And when I
Speaker 1: first sat down to record this episode, I made a
Speaker 1: common mistake, which was that I talked about bawd and
Speaker 1: bits per second as if they are the same thing,
Speaker 1: and they are not. So if you hear someone say
Speaker 1: a modem is undred baud, this does not mean that
Speaker 1: the modem tray submitted data at two point four kilobits
Speaker 1: or two thousand, four hundred bits per second. In fact,
Speaker 1: hundred baud modems had a range of speeds from nine
Speaker 1: point six kill a bits per second all the way
Speaker 1: up to nineteen point two kill a bits per second.
Speaker 1: There were old modems that did top out at two thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred bits per second, but they were not twenty
Speaker 1: four hundred bawd modems. They were actually either six hundred
Speaker 1: bawd or twelve hundred baud modems, so remember bawd and
Speaker 1: bits per second are different. Also, while the top consumer
Speaker 1: modems of the time could reach speeds of twenty eight
Speaker 1: point eight kill a bits per second, it was possible
Speaker 1: to lease phone lines. Companies could do this and achieve
Speaker 1: speeds of up to fifty six kill a bits per second,
Speaker 1: but consumer modems would not reach those speeds until the
Speaker 1: late nineteen nineties. As you listen to the rest of
Speaker 1: this episode, I might trip up a bit on that,
Speaker 1: but I wanted to use this opportunity to address a
Speaker 1: goof that I made early on. Anyway, at this point
Speaker 1: in the modem noise sequence, the two modems are figuring
Speaker 1: out what speed they can communicate so that they can
Speaker 1: set the rest of the rules. All right, pass Jonathan,
Speaker 1: take it away. The next few signals are a handshake
Speaker 1: between the two modems that set various parameters that dictate
Speaker 1: stuff like the data bit number and parody between the
Speaker 1: two modems. To get into all of that would be
Speaker 1: very technical, we're just going to skip over it. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it's the rules by which the two modems will follow
Speaker 1: as they exchange information. Then there's a rate negotiation for
Speaker 1: how fast the modems will actually allow data to travel
Speaker 1: between them, and then the two modems establish a connection
Speaker 1: that allows for simultaneous communication, which means the modems can
Speaker 1: both send and receive data on the same line at
Speaker 1: the same time. Assuming all that goes well, the connection
Speaker 1: is accepted, and you finally hear the sound of actual
Speaker 1: through it between the two modems before your modem speaker
Speaker 1: switches off, so you don't have to hear it the
Speaker 1: whole time you're on the Internet. Okay, that took a while,
Speaker 1: but I felt it was necessary to understand earth links business.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we'll pick back up with earth Link,
Speaker 1: but first let's take another quick break now. As I mentioned,
Speaker 1: when earth Link launched in nine four, the Internet was
Speaker 1: in a rapid growth period and stuff like transit fees
Speaker 1: and peerage was still shaking out. Dayton's determination to have
Speaker 1: an I s P with good customer service proved to
Speaker 1: be a popular notion, and his little company began to
Speaker 1: grow steadily. In earth Link and the newly formed Netscape
Speaker 1: Communications Corporation signed a deal that would really help out.
Speaker 1: Like earth Link, Netscape had launched in it had also
Speaker 1: introduced the mosaic Netscape browser, which quickly became the dominant
Speaker 1: web browser on the market, though we should also remember
Speaker 1: this was a very small market by today's standards. Subsequently,
Speaker 1: the company would name the browser Netscape Navigator, and it
Speaker 1: was a commercial web browser, meaning customers would need to
Speaker 1: pay for it in order to install it on their machines, or,
Speaker 1: as was the case with earth Link, another company like
Speaker 1: an I s P, could purchase a license to offer
Speaker 1: the browser on either machines or installation software that customers
Speaker 1: would then use. So you could be a computer manufacturer
Speaker 1: and make this deal and O E M in other words,
Speaker 1: and then sell the computers to customers and it would
Speaker 1: already have Netscape Navigator on it, or if you were
Speaker 1: earth Link, you would offer up an installation c D
Speaker 1: that would include the Netscape Navigator browser to make it
Speaker 1: really easy to connect to the World Wide Web and
Speaker 1: earth Link. Meanwhile, on the infrastructure side, earth Link made
Speaker 1: a really shrewd move. Rather than building out banks of
Speaker 1: telephones connected to various telephone company networks across the United States,
Speaker 1: which would have been an administrative and maintenance nightmare to oversee,
Speaker 1: instead earth Link least capacity from existing networks, and a
Speaker 1: lot of these were networks that were stuff that wasn't
Speaker 1: handling your your standard phone conversation communications. They were instead
Speaker 1: networks that were dedicated to stuff like verifying credit card transactions.
Speaker 1: So earth Link would lease those lines to serve as
Speaker 1: connection points for the Internet for their customers, routing incoming
Speaker 1: calls from customers to available leased lines on these other companies,
Speaker 1: And because the lines actually belonged to another company, earth
Speaker 1: Link wasn't the one responsible to keep up with maintenance
Speaker 1: on an increasingly complicated network. They were using exist sting
Speaker 1: infrastructure that otherwise was being dormant. Earth Link also signed
Speaker 1: an agreement with a company called you u Net Technologies.
Speaker 1: You you Net was one of the first I s
Speaker 1: p s, having been founded in nineteen seven, so two
Speaker 1: years before commercial Internet traffic actually started crossing the NSF
Speaker 1: net backbone. It was also one of the tier one networks,
Speaker 1: having built out a considerable infrastructure early on in the
Speaker 1: Internet days, you you net was one of the largest
Speaker 1: and fastest growing I s p s in the world.
Speaker 1: Earth Links agreement meant that earth Link would connect customers
Speaker 1: to you you net phone lines. The agreement meant that
Speaker 1: earth Link could sign up customers for service and give
Speaker 1: those customers you you net dial up numbers, and in return,
Speaker 1: earth Link would pay you unt a fee to access
Speaker 1: that dial up number bank and this dramatically increased earth
Speaker 1: links reach, as you u net had access points across
Speaker 1: nearly one hundred cities in the United States. While earth
Speaker 1: Link was still physically really a regional I s P
Speaker 1: mostly rooted out of the West Coast. Unit, by the way,
Speaker 1: has its own fascinating and complicated history, as it would
Speaker 1: go through a series of mergers and acquisitions over the years,
Speaker 1: and ultimately it would end up with Verizon, but that's
Speaker 1: a story for a different podcast. Oh and earth Link
Speaker 1: also did something that really resonated with its customers. So
Speaker 1: in the early days of the Internet, and this was
Speaker 1: back from the BBS days, the standard practice was for
Speaker 1: a company like an OSP or an I s P
Speaker 1: to charge customers two fees. The first fee was a
Speaker 1: recurring service fee, like a monthly fee. That's what gave
Speaker 1: customers access to the provider's services. But then there was
Speaker 1: a second fee, usually an hourly fee, and the more
Speaker 1: time a customer spent connected to a service each month,
Speaker 1: the higher this fee would be. Now, in part, this
Speaker 1: was a measure to help deal with the potential problem
Speaker 1: of traffic congestion. If a service became really popular, the
Speaker 1: demand for those services could outstrip its capacity. So if
Speaker 1: you've got ten phone lines and twelve people all want
Speaker 1: to connect to the Internet at the same time, you
Speaker 1: got a problem. So putting in an hourly fee would
Speaker 1: both maximize the revenue you were bringing in and act
Speaker 1: as a sort of limiting factor for individuals so that
Speaker 1: one person wouldn't take over an entire line by themselves,
Speaker 1: you know, like log into the service and just never
Speaker 1: log out. Well, that would be prohibitively expensive with the
Speaker 1: hourly fee, so that helped prevent that from happening. So
Speaker 1: it's both for a traffic management purpose and a revenue
Speaker 1: generating purpose, and customers hated it because it meant feeling
Speaker 1: like you were paying for the same thing twice. Earth
Speaker 1: Link changed that by introducing a flat fee for its service,
Speaker 1: so customers would pay nineteen dollars per month to earth Link.
Speaker 1: In return, they could access the service whenever they wanted,
Speaker 1: for as long as they wanted, with no hour leafees.
Speaker 1: Earth Link could do this because of those relationships that
Speaker 1: the company had been making with other telecommunications companies and
Speaker 1: other I s p s. As long as earth Link's
Speaker 1: capacity to make connections through its partners was ahead of demand,
Speaker 1: the flat fee would work just fine. By earth Link
Speaker 1: was really taking off, and that's when Sky Dayton would
Speaker 1: step down as CEO. He stayed on board as the
Speaker 1: chairman of earth Link, but the new CEO was Charles
Speaker 1: Gary Betty. And while this isn't an episode about Dayton himself,
Speaker 1: I do find it interesting that Dayton has a bit
Speaker 1: of a history of founding companies, getting them up and
Speaker 1: running and on the precipice of becoming, you know, truly huge,
Speaker 1: and then he steps back and then he does it
Speaker 1: all over again with a new company. And he reminds
Speaker 1: me of several other entrepreneurs who really excel in getting
Speaker 1: business ideas off the ground, but then they prefer to
Speaker 1: step away to launch something else that's new, because that's
Speaker 1: their real strong suit, and they'll hand the reins over
Speaker 1: to a different leader in order to foster the company
Speaker 1: into its next phase. So that was Gary Betty's role.
Speaker 1: When Gary Betty took over, earth Link had around half
Speaker 1: a million subscribers. It was still largely considered a regional
Speaker 1: I SP but under Betty's leadership, earth Link would expand dramatically,
Speaker 1: and that would include scooping up other regional I s
Speaker 1: p s to extend its own reach, and it would
Speaker 1: have more than five million customers by two thousand seven.
Speaker 1: He also oversaw earth links transition from a private company
Speaker 1: into a publicly traded one. Earth Link would hold its
Speaker 1: initial public offering in Sadly two thousand seven, Gary Betty
Speaker 1: would pass away at the age of forty nine after
Speaker 1: he developed cancer. And I'm sure we're going to cover
Speaker 1: more of Gary Betty's contributions in part two of this series,
Speaker 1: but it's time to switch gears for just a second now.
Speaker 1: I haven't really mentioned Atlanta since the beginning of this episode,
Speaker 1: and yet earth Link has its headquarters in Atlanta today,
Speaker 1: and the reason for that lies with the totally different
Speaker 1: Internet service provider company I mentioned earlier, mind Spring. The
Speaker 1: history of earth Link and the history of mind Spring
Speaker 1: are very much tied together, as later down the road
Speaker 1: the two merge, so I thought I would end this
Speaker 1: episode by talking a little bit about mind Springs story.
Speaker 1: The company's founder was Charles Brewer. Unlike Sky Dayton, Brewer
Speaker 1: went to university. He earned an NBA at Stanford's Graduate
Speaker 1: School of Business in fact, but like Dayton, Brewer encountered
Speaker 1: frustrations when he tried to connect to this new fangled
Speaker 1: thing called the Internet back in the early nineties, and
Speaker 1: like Dayton, his solution was to found a company that
Speaker 1: would facilitate Internet can actions and remove those frustrations. So
Speaker 1: he founded mind Spring as a result, and reportedly in
Speaker 1: those early days his company had only eight modems and
Speaker 1: for the first four months of its operation it didn't
Speaker 1: even charge its customers. It also shared staff and equipment
Speaker 1: with another I s P called Internet Atlanta. By mid
Speaker 1: mind Spring transitioned into a model that would charge customers,
Speaker 1: so now it actually had a way of making revenue
Speaker 1: and had worked out the various kinks during those first
Speaker 1: four months of you know, the technical aspects of being
Speaker 1: an i s P mind Spring had a reputation for
Speaker 1: having a really relaxed company culture with like no corporate
Speaker 1: dress code. Employees were encouraged to be creative where their workspaces.
Speaker 1: The descriptions I've read of mind Spring made me think
Speaker 1: of the dot com startups that would pop up in
Speaker 1: the years following, with companies like spending a lot of
Speaker 1: time and attention and money on creating really interesting workspaces.
Speaker 1: That's what mind Spring makes me think of. And like
Speaker 1: earth Link, mind Spring would form partnerships with various parties
Speaker 1: to extend its reach, its service, and to grow very quickly,
Speaker 1: and it would boost that by acquiring other companies, mostly
Speaker 1: small regional I s p s like Nando Net out
Speaker 1: of North Carolina i sp s. We're popping up all
Speaker 1: over the place. There'd be thousands of them over the
Speaker 1: next few years, almost ten thousand by the time we
Speaker 1: get to the late nineties, and MindSpring having a headstart
Speaker 1: and a good amount of cash due to early investors
Speaker 1: and a popular service, was buying them up whenever it could. Now.
Speaker 1: In past episodes of tech Stuff, I've talked about how
Speaker 1: some companies expand by building out their services into new regions,
Speaker 1: into new territories and to new kinds of business, like
Speaker 1: physically investing in building that stuff out. To do that
Speaker 1: is challenging, it is expensive, it is risky. But another
Speaker 1: way to expand very quickly is to just acquire other
Speaker 1: companies that already have a presence there, including competitors. And
Speaker 1: this is how companies like Comcast were able to grow
Speaker 1: so quickly. It wasn't that Comcast was laying cable to
Speaker 1: new communities. It was that Comcast was buying up local
Speaker 1: cable companies and then merging them into Comcasts overall business.
Speaker 1: Mind Spring was effectively doing the same thing, largely in
Speaker 1: the southeastern United States. Mind Spring became a publicly traded
Speaker 1: company in nineteen six, so one year before earth Link
Speaker 1: would do the same. By the various mergers and acquisitions
Speaker 1: meant mind Spring had a total of more than one
Speaker 1: million subscribers in the United States, and it was in
Speaker 1: late nine that mind Spring and earth Link announced an
Speaker 1: intention for the two companies to merge into a new
Speaker 1: single company. This company would keep the earth Link name,
Speaker 1: but it would have its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, so
Speaker 1: the mind Spring headquarters would become the earth Link headquarters.
Speaker 1: The mind Spring stock symbol of MSP e G would
Speaker 1: phase out, and the new company would have the trading
Speaker 1: symbol e l n K for earth Link. The combined
Speaker 1: company would be one of the largest I s p
Speaker 1: s in the world when the merger was complete, the
Speaker 1: second largest, in fact, just behind America Online, which had
Speaker 1: pivoted from being an online service provider to a true
Speaker 1: Internet service provider. In our next episode, we'll learn more
Speaker 1: about earth links fate in the two thousand's, how DSL
Speaker 1: and cable would change the game, and what would lead
Speaker 1: various news outlets to proclaim that earth Link was dead.
Speaker 1: In news flash, It's not dead. I guess it was
Speaker 1: only mostly dead because it's still around today. But that
Speaker 1: will wait for the next full Tech Stuff episode. Now,
Speaker 1: remember tomorrow's episode, We're going to have another dollarp of
Speaker 1: tech news. I'm going to give you a quick rundown
Speaker 1: of some of the headlines of what's going on in
Speaker 1: tech today. Join me then, and if you have a
Speaker 1: suggestion for topics that I should cover on Future Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff EPI zodes, whether they're a specific technology, a company,
Speaker 1: a person, or maybe a trend in tech or anything
Speaker 1: like that, reach out to me. The best ways to
Speaker 1: use Twitter to handle this tech stuff hs W, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.