The first hour: dial-up, and the provider the record barely keeps

1993 — 2004 · THE ISP GENERATION, AT THE RECORD'S SIZE

The commercial sequel is where this city's record thins — and the thinness is printed, not papered over: exactly one local internet provider of the first hour is named in any source. Quantum Connections appears in Flag Net's registry note as the local provider through which the board reached the internet in 1999, and it appears again in the trade record in June 2004, when a wire release datelined St. Joseph, Michigan announced its Q-Sat satellite broadband service for southern Michigan and northern Indiana — up to 400 kilobits a second at 59.95 dollars a month, aimed expressly at the rural customers dial-up had left behind — with the company's chief operating officer, Fred A. Pieplow, as its spokesman. Nothing else about the firm survives in the reachable record: no founding story, no subscriber counts, no acquisition, and not even a settled seat — the 2004 release's dateline is a Michigan city, and this section prints the firm at exactly that strength: a regional provider, local to a South Bend sysop in 1999, selling satellite internet across the state line five years later.

Beyond that one name, the record is a negative, and it is printed as one. This section's searches for a South Bend-founded commercial internet service provider of the 1990s — founding stories, subscriber records, absorptions into the national consolidations that ate the era's small providers — found none in the trade press, the company histories, or the state's business journalism. Indiana's documented first ISP story is Indianapolis's: Leo Doyle started IndyNet there in 1993, a founding the Indianapolis provider Midwest Internet states in its own 2003 release, noting that IndyNet had by then become part of EarthLink. South Bend's households, so far as the record reached shows, came online the way most of America did — through the national services' local access numbers and through the universities — while the region's documented internet builders put their money into the layer underneath the providers: the fiber and the exchange point the next two entries tell.Tribune's morgue open may close it.

Sources:

1. The 219 BBS registry, Flag Net entry — Quantum Connections named as the local ISP carrying the board's 1999 telnet connection. bbslist.textfiles.com
2. SpaceDaily / UPI wire release, June 3, 2004 — Quantum Connections launches Q-Sat satellite broadband for southern Michigan and northern Indiana; 59.95 dollars a month; COO Fred A. Pieplow; dateline St. Joseph, Michigan. spacedaily.com
3. Midwest Internet, Inc., press release, August 6, 2003 — Leo F. Doyle started IndyNet, Indiana's first ISP, in Indianapolis in 1993; by 2003 part of EarthLink. mw.net
4. Searches: the negative search for a South Bend-founded commercial ISP of the 1990s in trade press and Indiana business journalism.