Arrakis

» see arrakis.es as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The name is lifted straight from Frank Herbert's Dune, where Arrakis is the desert planet. The company was started in Seville in 1995 and went commercial in January 1996. Its founding story comes from the Spanish tech press rather than from any filing, and it runs like this: three friends in their twenties, the brothers Luis and German Torrado with Juan Ignacio Rodriguez, who had previously run a small PC repair shop, with German choosing the name and drawing the logo. The later company they founded after leaving was called Mentat, which is also Dune, so the habit stuck.

Its first site is dated October 1996 and has everything a 1996 Spanish homepage should: a hit counter, background MIDI, a banner advertising two megabits per second as though that were a boast, a tariff page and a link to the Spanish mirror of Tucows. What made Arrakis matter in Spain was the hosting. It gave users web space under the tilde convention, at arrakis.es slash tilde then your name, and it handed out vanity subdomains to people who asked.

By September 1998 El Pais was describing the market as five large Spanish providers, of which Arrakis, the Seville company, was the only one left in independent hands. Retevision had bought Servicom and Redes-TB, and a Valencian company had just taken all of Jet Internet. Five months later Arrakis went too. British Telecom bought it in February 1999, and a trade report that March called it the country's largest internet provider. No source anywhere states the price, so this grave does not print one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the tilde pages ~

The clearest evidence of what Arrakis actually was is sitting inside Spanish Wikipedia, where 191 articles still cite a www.arrakis.es address as a reference. Almost all of them point at personal pages: a dictionary of Seville ceramics, an atlas for identifying Aragonese birds, a page on the mosque at Almonaster la Real, a Real Betis supporters' history, notes on Spanish Civil War emigration, a gliding page, somebody's high school biology notes.

Those links are all dead now and they have been for years, but Arrakis kept answering them politely for a long time. From 2004 the hosting served a custom branded error page to every broken tilde address instead of a bare 404. The personal pages host was still delivering images in October 2013, on the day the company put up its own goodbye notice, which pulls one of its buttons from a user directory belonging to somebody called herna. The farewell page was partly hosted on the amateur layer it was saying goodbye to.

~ what BT did with it ~

BT took the company apart rather than running it. On 23 February 2001 BT Telecomunicaciones, as sole shareholder, resolved to spin the entire internet portals branch out of Arrakis into a newly created company called Genie Internet Espana. The consumer half was carved off and renamed. Genie Espana then closed its portal on 20 February 2002, telling users by email to go to a different site, from a postal address in the World Trade Center building on the Isla de la Cartuja in Seville, which was Arrakis's own address. The letterhead changed and the building did not.

In September 2001 The Register reported that BT was looking to offload Arrakis and that the likely buyer was Tiscali. No sale happened. BT kept it another thirteen years, and what it became in that time is visible on its last working homepage: an ADSL and telephony reseller selling BT Go ADSL with calls, Arrakis eOficina, Arrakis CreaWeb, Arrakis Backup Online and Panda antivirus, with a BT logo in the corner linking away to bt.es. The footer carried a badge reading Arrakis 10 Anos. A pioneer ISP finished as a page of bundles with somebody else's mark on it.

~ nos movemos ~

The site died first. On 7 October 2013 arrakis.com was still serving its own homepage. Within ten days it had collapsed to a notice headed "Nos Movemos", explaining that the BT Group had decided to unify all its web pages and that everything at arrakis.com had been moved to bt.es slash pymes, with a fifteen-second redirect and a link for anyone who still wanted their webmail. The footer on that page reads 1995, Arrakis Servicios y Comunicaciones, Grupo BT Espana. By December the address was answering with a bare redirect.

The legal ending took another year and is recorded properly. The sole shareholder resolved on 19 August 2014 to merge Arrakis Servicios y Comunicaciones into BT Espana by absorption, with accounting effect from 1 April. The notice ran in the commercial registry bulletin on 2 September, and the merger was inscribed in the Mercantile Registry on 13 November 2014. BT had tried the same absorption once before: in September 2007 the shareholders of both companies resolved on an identical merger and deposited the project in the Madrid and Seville registries, and then nothing happened for seven more years.

There was a Turkish version of this layer and it looked much the same: free web space from whoever your provider happened to be, a tilde in the address, a hit counter down in the footer. What Spain got that Turkey did not is an archive of it, because so many of those Arrakis pages were the only published source on some local subject that Wikipedia editors cited them, and the citations are still there pointing at nothing.

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