I’ve told the big Netcom stories; you know how I got there and you’ve heard about my brush with history. This post contains a bunch more that aren’t really big enough to hang an entire article on.
My first day at Netcom, everyone was freaking out. It felt like the sky was falling. When someone slowed down enough to explain what was going on, I decided the freak out was justified. Back in those early days of the Internet, nobody had realized that you could just send bulk messages to as many people as possible on the theory that some small percentage of them would reply. Commercial spam hadn’t been invented — in fact, people were a little bit dubious that asking people to pay for an Internet account made sense.
So the day I got there was the day a couple of shady lawyers named Canter and Siegel posted messages to literally thousands of Usenet groups (think forums). Absolutely shocking at the time, and while they didn’t do this from our servers our users were still very annoyed because they were seeing these unwanted messages on the systems we were providing. And hey, I was the swing shift support guy! So that’s what I dealt with for my first week or so: answering angry emails with a stock response and trying to calm down people who called us on the phone to complain.
We didn’t have any complex customer support systems. We didn’t have customer support systems at all. We had a single text file that support staff added notes to at the end of every shift, we had a single email account that we shared, and we had optimism that wound up being fairly limited once we realized how much of a grind the job was going to be.
Oh, but we had Glee Harrah Cady. Glee ran support, among a bunch of other policy-related things, and she was the best. Calm, supportive, and knowledgeable. So that was all right. I probably would have stuck around a while longer if I hadn’t gotten promoted out of support.
That happened when the guy who had been running email quit on short notice to go study to be an architect in New York City. I don’t remember his name so I haven’t ever been able to see if he was successful but I hope he was. At that point I was the most technical person in support who management knew at all (Trip might have been better but he was graveyard shift), so they offered me the job if I wanted it. It came with a little raise and the other guy in that group, Greg, was willing to mentor me so I said sure. It worked out pretty well in terms of advancing my technical chops.
I also learned that Netcom was, essentially, ripping most of us off by paying us a fraction of what we could make elsewhere. The CEO, Bob Rieger, was not a terribly ethical guy. My co-worker Brian turned me onto this contracting company called Taos Mountain Software, I gave them a call, and a month or so later I was literally making more than twice as much as I’d been making at Netcom as a contractor at Sun Microsystems. The salary difference wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds, since that wasn’t a guaranteed long term job, but in those boom years it was pretty damned secure.
The way I got to know Brian well enough for him to do me favors was through working on his domain name with him. Netcom registered a lot of domain names, since we had a cheap account type which allowed you to funnel any address at your domain into your UNIX mailbox. Brian registered pft.com and had me help set it up, which led to me buying innocence.com soon after once I realized how cool having your own domain was, which is how I managed to get a single word domain name.
So domains. Back then, domain names were free. You just sent an email to a company called InterNIC and gave them some technical details and within a couple of days your domain name was live. As I said, we registered a lot of them — some months more than anyone else on the Internet.
One day I picked up my phone and the voice at the other end said “Hi, I’m Jon Postel.” I knew exactly who that was; Jon was no longer hand-processing all the new domain requests, but he was the most important person in the DNS space at the time (and arguably for quite some time thereafter). I imagine he got my contact info from InterNIC. But why?
My first instinct was that we were gonna get cut off for abusing DNS. Commercial use of the Internet was still a little controversial and certainly what we were doing was not anyone’s intent. However, it turned out he wanted my advice on how much domain names should cost per year. I thought about it for a minute or so and said “Well, you don’t want to price individuals out of the market, but you want it to be meaningful… how does $50 sound?”
I have no idea how many other people he called, or how the final decision got made, but a few months later InterNIC announced that new domain names would cost $50 a year. There is some possibility that this was the most influential thing I’ve ever done in technology. I peaked early, if so.
Man, I could talk about the support crew (and the others) for ages. Louie Lee, who went on to be a serious player in the networking world… Jason Bentley, who I think got hired with a promise similar to the one Rieger made me about moving into tech writing… Gretchen, still among my dearest friends. It was a great crew. I stole a copy of that text file I mentioned when I left, but lost it on some UNIX account I forgot to preserve somewhere along the way, which is really too bad. As a document of day to day tech support life back in the 90s, it had historical value, plus people got in the habit of chatting with each other in there.
But I don’t have it any more, so I’ll tell another couple of Bob Rieger stories. The first one is apocryphal, from before my time, but Bruce has been commenting on these over on LinkedIn so maybe he can validate it. There was a power outage in the office, which was also the primary datacenter — our Sparc servers were a few dozen yards away from the cubicle farm and there was a bank of modems plugged into phone lines next to the Sparc servers. Bob fretted for a little while, then hopped in his pickup truck and drove down to Home Depot to pick up a generator and fuel. When he got back, he realized that he wasn’t gonna be able to get the generator out of the back of his truck and up to the machine room, so he needed to run an extension cord to it. Down the stairs? No way. He ran back up to the offices, picked up an office chair, and was about to start breaking a window when the power thankfully came back on.
The second one I was there for. I was answering phones on the swing shift and this very irate customer started yelling at me because their dedicated phone line was busy. That shouldn’t happen; the whole point of being a business customer was that you got a dedicated phone line which wasn’t part of the hunt group.
I should explain hunt groups. If you needed more than one phone line back then, you had the phone company string however many physical lines you needed to your office and you had them configure them in a hunt group, such that calling the first phone number in the group just hunted down the line until it found a line that wasn’t in use. In our case the phone lines were connected to modems but the concept was invented for busy offices which might need to take multiple calls at once. It worked pretty well most places, although our phone lines in Atlanta were a total mess because the Atlanta area code was the largest in the US and the local telco down there had trouble keeping things working.
Anyway, so business customers shouldn’t be using hunt groups. But when I asked this guy what number his modem was dialing, he gave me a number at the end of the hunt group. I was confused but smart enough not to tell him this; instead, I looked him up in our records and found out that he had some sort of weird “business” account. We were charging him twice as much but he didn’t have a dedicated line. Um.
So I reached out to one of our network engineers and asked what the hell. “Oh,” he said, “That guy. Yeah, it’s one of Bob’s special things. He’s getting ripped off. Usually the San Jose hunt group isn’t full, so he never has trouble getting on, but occasionally it is full and this happens.”
“OK… but what do I do?”
“Go into the machine room, find the last modem in the hunt group — that’s his line — and flip it off. Wait a minute, then flip it back on. If it doesn’t light up with an incoming call, go tell the guy to try it again.”
I did that, with some degree of discomfort. It worked perfectly. I felt guilty for ages. That was Bob Rieger for you. He wound up making a fortune when he sold the company off, too. Although not as much as he might have made if NetCruiser had been successful.
NetCruiser was our big leap into graphical Internet. Peter Kaminski wrote a web browser, an email client, and a bunch of other tools which was released as a front end to a new flavor of Netcom account, for people who didn’t want a UNIX command line. It wasn’t unsuccessful per se, but Marc Andreessen released Netscape right around the same time and they ate our lunch — probably a better product and certainly Andreessen had the rep from developing Mosaic, the first Web browser that could display images inline. Don’t ever let him tell you there’s no value to universities and the NSF; he learned to write Web browsers at UIUC and he wouldn’t be rich without the work the university subsidized.
The other legitimately fun thing about working at Netcom was dealing with trolls, which fell into my domain as part of the mail and Usenet team. I had the vast pleasure of banning a couple of early infamous Usenet conspiracy theorists from our systems; I remember Dan Gannon, Holocaust denier, and homophobe Dan Karnes. In retrospect I should have realized back then how much I enjoyed working on policy and privacy; my career might have been very different. In practice I didn’t really figure that out until I worked on COPPA mitigation efforts much later at Disney, and I didn’t quite have the nerve to switch careers at that late date.
Coming close to 2,000 words here which makes this by far my longest one of these to date and I haven’t even told the story about the time we found out what sort of material we were making available on the file sharing site we gave our users. You’re all on the Internet, you can probably figure out what that one user whose files generated ten times as much traffic as anyone else was doing. (Text files, y’all, this is before we routinely shared images. Kind of impressive when you think about it.)
So I’ll wrap for now; ask me in person if you want more of those wild, woolly days. I was at Netcom not much more than a year — hard to believe.