Before the web: the bulletin boards, and the unanswered ISP question

1986–1994 · THE FIRST HOUR

Fort Wayne was online before the web existed — by telephone, at 1,200 baud: the surviving registries of the 219 area code's bulletin-board systems document a local scene that ran for a decade before the first browser. The record names them: Secret Service, running in 1986; NEI BBS, Doug Tanner's Wildcat! board, 1986 to 1989; The Silicon Alternative, Don Gump's board, 1988 to 1994; Byte Carrier, also listed as NE Indiana Net, Ron Kuhn's system, 1989 to 1991; The Outpost, Eric Asberry's, from 1989; and Shadownet, 1988 to 1992, whose own registry note remembers starting at 1,200 baud, the phone ringing off the hook all night, pizza parties of forty people, and a house the scene knew as "Shadownet central." These were businesses only in embryo — hobbies with phone bills — but they were the city's first online public, and the registry is the document that proves they existed.

The commercial sequel is where the record thins to a negative, and it is printed as one. This section's searches for a Fort Wayne-founded commercial internet service provider of the first hour — the local firm that sold the city its first dial-up accounts — found no documented name in the reachable record: no founding story, no subscriber counts, no acquisition, in trade press, company histories, or the state's business journalism. Indiana's documented early-ISP history belongs to Indianapolis, where IndyNet began in 1993. Fort Wayne's households, so far as the record reached shows, came online the way most of America did — through national services' local access numbers and through the universities — while its own first-hour providers, if they traded under names the record kept, kept them out of every source. The gap is stated rather than filled; a later search with the Journal Gazette's morgue open may close it.

Sources:

1. The 219 area-code BBS registry (textfiles.com archive) — the Fort Wayne boards, their operators and their years: Secret Service (1986), NEI BBS (1986–1989), The Silicon Alternative (1988–1994), Byte Carrier / NE Indiana Net (1989–1991), The Outpost (1989), Shadownet (1988–1992) and its own retrospective note. bbslist.textfiles.com
2. Searches: the negative search for a Fort Wayne-founded commercial ISP of the 1990s in trade press and Indiana business journalism.