Long-lost ISPs, and the innovations which shaped modern broadband
Modern broadband was forged on the crucible of ideas from ISPs who are no longer with us.
The 2020s won’t be remembered positively by historians (or by the people who lived through them), but there have been one or two bright spots amid the seemingly endless gloom.
The breakneck pace of domestic internet connectivity is one positive.
We recently reported on the rollout of 2Gbps home broadband, future-proofing connections for technologies and bandwidth levels still to come.
Modern-day consumers are familiar with the likes of push email and freemium software models, yet these were innovations back in the 1990s.
Indeed, some of the innovations which shaped modern broadband can be traced back to those exciting (and occasionally intimidating) early days when home internet was still finding its feet.
Sadly, many of the companies who moulded the modern internet didn’t survive to see it, having been bankrupted, purchased, rebranded or swallowed up in mass mergers.
It’s therefore instructive (and also pleasingly nostalgic) to consider some of the innovations which helped to shape modern broadband, and to remember the ISPs that pioneered them.
Push email notifications and walled gardens
Today, we take smartphone notifications and on-screen alerts for granted, but anyone dialling into AOL Online in the Nineties would have been greeted by an early example of push email.
Immediately after successfully dialling up via a screeching modem, a chirpy American voice declared “you’ve got mail” in parallel with an envelope notification on your AOL homepage.
Other platform-specific innovations included online courses, the first parental controls and a proprietary search engine.
AOL also debuted the ‘walled garden’ browser concept to simplify internet access for digital rookies, which Facebook infamously attempted to replicate with their aborted Internet.org project.
AOL was America’s biggest ISP in the Nineties, as befitting a company originally known as America Online, before a disastrous merger with Time Warner in the Noughties.
The AOL.com website still exists, but the brand has been endlessly sold and resold. Its iconic dial-up services were discontinued last September, and few UK consumers pay it any heed.
Instant messaging and fixed price subscriptions
AOL’s rapid fall from grace was encapsulated in the 2017 discontinuation of AOL Instant Messenger – the first messaging tool many people ever used.
Instant messaging provided an early internet use case, enabling real-time message distribution and gradually evolving from basic text into emojis, file transfers, media clips and video calls.
Proprietary IM platforms were offered by British ISPs like Demon Internet and Pipex.
Like AOL, Pipex was repeatedly merged and acquired before its name vanished in 2008. Before then, its innovations included always-on home broadband and wireless connections.
Demon Internet was another British ISP, acquired by Scottish Telecom in 1997, rebranded in 1999 and eventually incorporated into Vodafone before the latter closed it down altogether.
Demon pioneered the fixed-price monthly subscription deals consumers take for granted nowadays, and it was also an early example of a company created through crowdfunding.
Free software and cookies
App stores have conditioned us to expect software to be freely available, yet one of the first experiences many consumers had with free utilities involved CDs – or even floppy discs.
Demon Internet was available for the Commodore Amiga, while Freeserve Windows CDs were ubiquitous in home electrical stores. Unusually at the time, neither commanded a fee.
You took a disc home, installed its contents onto your computer, connected a modem and used the newly installed software to load a proprietary web browser.
Other free ISP software discs came from LineOne (acquired by Tiscali), Tiscali themselves (acquired by Carphone Warehouse spinout TalkTalk), CompuServe and Netscape (both sold to AOL).
Netscape also gave the world Navigator, a pioneering web browser whose use of cookies, JavaScript and on-the-fly page displays helped to formalise modern broadband browsers.
Contrary to popular recollection, it was the ViolaWWW web browser which introduced bookmarks, before Navigator refined the concept with folders, toolbars and drag-and-drop functionalities.
