Algonet

» see algonet.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The modems Algonet's first Swedish customers dialed in 1994 ran at 14400 bits per second, and the staff had to restart them by hand to stop them crashing. Turkey got to that point a few years later, and the modem I first dialed out on in 1998 was the same class of hardware making the same noise.

Ragnar Lönn had been using the internet at school since 1989 and spent the early 1990s trying to convince Swedish companies that ordinary people would pay for it. The answer was no until spring 1994, when the publisher Semic agreed to fund it and hand over a room. On 1 July 1994 he started working on the thing full time.

The name came last. Micnet was taken in the United States and Nordnet was taken in Sweden, so he thought about Älgö in Nacka, where his parents lived, dropped the umlaut, and noticed that algo is Spanish for "something". Algonet, then. Something net.

What it sold was plain for the period and generous for the price. A dial-up connection, web space, an email address, and a Unix shell account you could log into, for 129 kronor a month and 6 kronor for every connected hour. Users got to try the system in mid-August 1994. By September there were sixty of them, against a business plan that assumed four hundred would be enough to pay Lönn a salary. By January 1995 there were fifteen hundred, and later four thousand.

Growth like that broke things. Torsten Larsson, Semic's managing director at the time, had just come back from America having looked at AOL and wanted a Swedish version of it; Lönn argued that the internet was already the attractive product and did not need one. The 64 kbps line ordered from Tele2's Swipnet took so long to arrive that the service ran on 14400 bps modems in the meantime, and the modems had to be restarted by hand to stop them crashing. In March 1995 Algonet simply stopped taking new customers for a while to catch up.

~ the record ~

~ twenty six square meters ~

The room in Sundbyberg was twenty six square meters with ventilation so poor that the heat made it practically impossible to work in. That is the detail Lönn's own account keeps returning to, and it is the honest physical description of what an internet service provider was in 1994. A small hot room with modems in it, and a leased line you were still waiting for.

By the spring of 1995 a new managing director, Bo Wänghammar, an economist and computer consultant, had taken over the running of it. In May they moved to larger premises near Hötorget in central Stockholm, which meant a temporary outage and then, gradually, a service that stayed up. Telenordia bought the company in April 1996, nineteen months after the first sixty users logged in.

~ a thousand or so ~

After that the customers were sold on rather than the company. Glocalnet took over Telenordia's subscribers in the early 2000s. Telenor then bought Glocalnet in 2006, which left it a sister company to Bredbandsbolaget inside the same group. Through every one of those transfers the @algonet.se addresses kept resolving.

In December 2014 Sweden's Internetmuseum, writing up Algonet as a milestone, noted almost in passing that "there are actually still a thousand or so who use Algonet today". Twenty years after a hot room in Sundbyberg, the brand existed as nothing but the back half of some people's email addresses, and nobody had got around to switching it off. The web hosting had already gone, closed by Glocalnet around 2016 with no warning and no chance for users to back anything up.

~ the last of february ~

On 9 February 2018 Feber reported that Glocalnet was about to close the Algonet mail servers on the last day of February, and that Algonet users had been told nothing about it. PC för Alla called Telenor's press office the same day and got it confirmed on the record by press chief Aron Samuelsson, who gave the reason as the GDPR coming into force on 25 May: new limits on holding personal data for people who are not your customers.

He also described how the notice had gone out. Emails had bounced. For users they believed had not been reached, Telenor had already cut off access so the person would be forced to phone in and find out. He did not dispute that the old addresses carried a certain sentimental value. Twenty-four years after Lönn put the modems in an unventilated room, the last thing left of Algonet was a login people kept using because nobody had made them stop, and then somebody did.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »