[NNagain] The rise and fall of the 90's telecom bubble

[Joe Hamelin]

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 <
nnagain at 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
> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>


-- 
--
Joe Hamelin, W7COM, Tulalip, WA, 360-474-7474
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