The ‘90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

1998 plea for restraint reveals a lost world where the 'Net was an opt-in experience.

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Shame the guy couldn’t be bothered to do a short interview with a writer from a well known tech magazine. Most small businesses CEOs would jump at the chance. Or at least they should.
- I was flabbergasted that he sounded like such a prick. Why would he not approach this in good humor after so many years?

Today, Gene Fourney is the CEO of IT company TechnologyWest in Denver. I thought this story wouldn't be complete unless I made an attempt to contact him. I emailed him, asking him some questions about NetWorks at the time, but he wasn't interested in reminiscing. "I'm not revisiting an issue that you may have experienced in 1998 with Networks," Fourney wrote. "Times are dramatically different in 2023 than they were in 1998. Not sure why anyone would have an interest in revisiting 28K dialup days of 1998."
Lmao, what is wrong with this guy? I found this whole article to be humorous and light and it was a fun look back on the old days. Tons of people have an "interest in revisiting it".
Given his location it strikes me that I have a solid chance of actually meeting this guy in person and sussing out why he's such a no-fun prick.

I'm a bit of a digital pack rat but I can't imagine having kept everything since the early 90s.
- I had emails back then from both home and work (and BBS rimemail and fido) all burned to CD's for archival. Found them 10 years ago in storage, none were still readable. :(
  
  Aww. That's disappointing. cd-rw really don't have the best shelf life unfortunately.

In the mid 90s I set up a dedicated dial-up line to an ISP. I had arranged with the ISP to have a dedicated phone line of my own so they were cool. The phone company on the other hand was kind of pissed and tried to threaten me with penalties. I kind of understood why it was a problem for them in terms of provisioning, but... that's what there was then.

I made sure that my dual bonded ISDN were 64k lines not those cheap 56k! 128k was living large back then!

Dude, I'd long been dual ISDN by then. If my connection to my ISP ever went down, it was a race to see which of us called the other first and they'd work to resolve it with me right then.

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