Ken Uchikura Newsletter Vol. 211 December 2022 Special PSPINC's Internet Business Beginnings: Part 2
12月
15日
December 2022 Special PSPINC's Internet Business Beginnings: Part 2
In my previous newsletter, I talked about my encounter with SprintLink in 1996, which taught me how the internet works, how to pay for it, and how I got a T1 line from SprintLink. At the time, it was important for me to understand who pays for the internet, who pays backbone providers, like SprintLink, what internet service providers buy, and what they sell. Once you understand what they’re selling, then you can think about your own business.
When I pulled the T1 into my office, I could connect my computer and get unlimited access to the internet. This way, there wouldn’t be any additional cost no matter how much time I spend online or which website I accessed. Moreover, the T1 high-speed connection was very comfortable. That being said, there weren’t any video streaming services at the time, as it was nine years before YouTube came out in 2005. In 1996, there were reportedly only 100,000 web pages in total. I’ve probably viewed most of the web pages that existed at the time.
After I had a comfortable environment to access the internet, I wanted to have my own website. But I didn’t know how to get one. So, I used the advice I got from the people at SprintLink to start preparing for my own web site. I wondered if I needed a “telecommunications carrier” or some other certification to host a website, but it turns out I didn’t need one at all. All I needed was my own IP address, so I procured a Class B IP address (65534 (216-2)), which is now very valuable.
With this IP address, we registered MOSHIx2.net and PSPINC.com in 1996. So, PSPINC.com is a pretty old domain. Then, we set up the servers necessary to publish our homepage: a DNS server (the same MOSIx2.net server we still use today), a web server (a Windows NT Server because we didn’t know about UNIX at the time), and a mail server (though I don’t remember which one we used). In other words, it was quite an investment.
Because of the technical difficulties and how much work this investment took, most companies couldn’t get a website yet. So, we came up with the idea of domain management, a service that manages web and email on behalf of our clients. Now, it’s our hosting business. But again, this was in 1996. So, this means PSPINC’s hosting business started 26 years ago. However, the hosting environment wasn’t nearly as organized as it is today. We had to do everything from page set up to email set up manually, and the servers went down every few hours.
In my next newsletter, I’ll talk more about what the business model looked like during that time. I hope you look forward to it.
Kenichi Uchikura
President / CEO
Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.
ken.uchikura＠pspinc.com
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