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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:33 PM

    another thing that’s been on my mind recently, from the olden tymes, back when I ran a small regional dial-up ISP for the first few years of the web, is the relationship we had with our customers.

    we were not a big player. this was southwest florida, and the only reason it made any sense to launch a dial-up ISP in the mid-90s is that southwest florida was a few years behind it tech take-up anyway, so it was prime time for the area really. We only had 64 lines coming into our office and they were sharing a fractional T1. it was fine. we weren’t oversubscribed more than about 8-to-1 when most of the industry was already playing with 25-to-1 ratios of subscribers to modems.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:41 PM

    so, it’s 1994, your neighbors are tech averse on average, and you’re starting a company to give them internet access. how do you build that market?

    our answer was outreach. we sent folks out to talk to people, usually social organizations looking for a guest speaker for a monthly meeting, and we’d explain what the internet was and the world wide web and email and how those could be useful for just about anyone who wanted to communicate with others over any distance with little effort. we taught free classes on specific tasks (how to use your email program, how to build a web page using the free web site storage that comes with your account, how to use ftp to transfer files to that space, what else you could do with your shell account (gopher, muds, telnet, etc)). we had a whole big conference room in our small office dedicated to those classes and set up as a lab space. and if folks’ computers weren’t up-to-date in terms of tech to the point of affecting their experience, a local computer store always sent one of their guys over to talk to folks about upgrade options (they supplied the lab computers too!).

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:42 PM

    we built a market by showing people things of value they could do with this one monthly charge of $25 and the computer they already had but didn’t use much. they could show off their vacation pics on a website about their travels. they could get new pics of the grandkids in their email all the way from california, can you believe that? and if they had problems we couldn’t resolve over the phone (my phone - all support calls went directly to me, the one technical person in the company, at all hours of the day) then I’d get in my car and come to your house and fix it on your end. we were full-service because we were trying to be a good part of the community we served.

    we absolutely wanted to make money, but we wanted to do it by providing value.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:46 PM

    we were also happy with our scale. we did not want to expand - we served the county we were in and the dialing area we were in and didn’t even look at neighboring points-of-presence. it would have spread us too thin and we wouldn’t have been able to serve our current customers, so we didn’t.

    we grew the team, especially when the business web site, uh, business picked up. of course, there were no web designers or developers to hire in 1994 in southwest florida, so we hired a couple small engine mechanics we knew, because I figured if they understood how a small engine worked and was built they could understand html and how a website was built. I was right, they were great and ended up having long successful careers on the web.

    we didn’t want to take over anything, we just wanted to provide a service for a fair price. and it was working! our business was great.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:50 PM

    where’s the inevitable sad turn, Sundog, where’s it all go to shit, that’s what we’re all waiting for.

    well, we folded for a big check from the regional telephone company that had decided a few years later that maybe there was in fact something to this whole “normal people using the internet” thing they’d been pointedly ignoring. like, twenty years of forward revenue per subscriber type big check. my partners were business guys, they understood finance and stuff, hell, one was a certified public accountant as his “day job”. they said it was the best idea ever, so out we went. of course, my partners were all retirement age-ish anyway, whereas I was young and spry. if it had been my majority, I’d probably have stayed in it and ignored the check to keep doing the thing and would have lost the thing anyway in the next few years as broadband exploded and I had no connections to that world (yet).

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:52 PM

    but I think back to that little ISP and how we ran it every now and then, and I try to see any glimmer at all of that operational style in the current tech industry, and if it’s out there it’s obscured beyond the reach of my vision, that’s for sure. and that makes me sad. and I hope we see more small, constrained, focused business again in the future because it can be really cool.

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  • peter hessler @openbsdphessler@bsd.network
    Oct 23, 2026, 11:00 PM

    @djsundog this is one of the reasons I'm still positive about doing open source. My code can contribute to someone building a small business to solve their and their communities needs. And with luck, they understand their limitations and stay within them.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 23, 2026, 11:07 PM

    @phessler the very first program I ever wrote for cash money was a newspaper delivery route management program for our paper delivery person. he had a few hundred houses on his daily route, billed either weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or annually, and each week he either needed to write out a payment due bill on tri-copy carbon paper pads or he wrote out a thanks for being a subscriber note if it wasn’t a house’s billing cycle. took him about 12 hours every week just to manage the billing part. I told him I thought a computer program could print it out for him a lot faster and he said he had a computer he got his kid for college that the kid left behind, so I wrote him a qbasic program to manage his route - all the crud stuff, ordering so he could print a route list for when he’d take a vacation and have a guest delivery person covering for him, exactly the right bills each week came spitting out the printer. he gave me $1500 for it, and told me he’d give me another $1000 for every copy of it he sold to other delivery drivers if I’d let him do the sales. paid for my first car with that basic program. no reason things like that can’t happen anymore if we can get rid of the corporate soul suckers and beat them back into submission.

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  • coldclimatecoldclimate@hachyderm.io
    Oct 24, 2026, 7:00 AM

    @djsundog I have enjoyed this thread greatly as somebody who was a consumer of early regional internet in the UK

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  • Mark Kruegermarkkrueg@treehouse.systems
    Oct 25, 2026, 1:58 AM

    @djsundog I enjoyed your reminiscence. My local ISP, www.sonic.com, is a bit like that still today. Lately they are growing a bit from being only local, so we will see how that goes. You’re right that it’s incredibly rare to find businesses like that anymore.

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  • Aaron Mahlerhalfpress@halfpress.com
    Oct 25, 2026, 10:35 AM

    @djsundog loved reading this as much of it felt as if I could have written it. Same timeframe, same scale for our little ISP and similar efforts speaking to groups, writing guest articles in local publications and tons of personal, hands-on teaching and support time in people’s homes and offices. The sellout to a telco also happened, but was after I had left.

    I look back on it all very fondly and, like you, look for modern versions of a similar approach and have a hard time finding examples.

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  • Luke O.loppear@social.coop
    Oct 24, 2026, 1:39 AM

    @djsundog similar timeframe early rural ISP here, and in part I know the positive nostalgia I have for it (beyond the personal nerd enthusiasm of the team (not even all guys) and baling-wire aesthetic) is because I left while it was still all going small and up, no sour taste. Helped rescue a.similar tiny fixed point rural wireless ISP a decade later and it was much more of a struggle all around as the broadband big players were firmly on the move. Disillusioned myself fully a couple years later building marketing platforms for those cable behemoths. But that early youthful feeling, still something I cherish.

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