ClarkNet

» see clark.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Jamie Clark started an internet company in April 1993 on his family's farm in Howard County, Maryland, between Clarksville and Columbia. The incorporated name was Clark Internet Services and the service was ClarkNet, running on clark.net. The machines lived in a cow barn that was still a working cow barn. Clark is deaf, and most of the people he hired in the first stretch were deaf too. His father was a Maryland state senator, which explains some of the press attention and none of the engineering.

The engineering was ahead of the region. ClarkNet was the first provider in the mid-Atlantic to sell dial-up TCP/IP over SLIP and PPP to home users rather than shell accounts to hobbyists, and one of the first anywhere in the country to hand every customer a free web page. CERN's early list of running web servers includes it inside the first hundred. It ran local dial-in numbers across Baltimore and much of the state, pushed flat-rate Centrex ISDN when that was an unusual thing to sell, and hosted one of the ten busiest Usenet feeds for a while.

At its largest the company had over twenty thousand dial-up customers and two thousand dedicated circuits, with around eighty employees behind them. NPR met the internet through ClarkNet, and so did the Washington Post. For a period it was the biggest dial-up provider between Baltimore and Washington, run out of a barn by a deaf founder who had hired mostly deaf staff.

I met this company as a filename. ClarkNet-HTTP is one of the standard workload traces in the web caching and load prediction literature, two weeks of 1995 access logs that people are still fitting models against in papers published last year. You see the name in a table of datasets, sitting next to NASA and Saskatchewan, and nothing in that table tells you it was a farm in Maryland.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the barn ~

The offices moved to Columbia as the company grew. The data center stayed in the barn. That detail did most of the work in the coverage: the Washington Post ran a piece on Clark in September 1993, five months after launch, and came back for another in 1996, and Fortune photographed him. NPR gave him a feature spot, which has a small irony in it given that his own service was the way NPR first got online.

The deaf-owned angle was real and it was also, by every account of the operation, secondary to the fact that the service worked. Customers stayed because the support was good and the local numbers were everywhere. Nobody signed up to a Maryland ISP in 1995 as a statement.

~ two weeks in August 1995 ~

Stephen Balbach at ClarkNet collected every HTTP request the company's web server answered from midnight on 28 August 1995 to the last second of 10 September. Martin Arlitt and Carey Williamson at the University of Saskatchewan cleaned it up and put it into the Internet Traffic Archive, the ACM SIGCOMM repository, as two seven-day logs. 3,328,587 requests, one line each, one-second timestamps, 171 and 172.5 megabytes of plain text.

It became furniture. If you have ever written anything about cache hit rates or about how request arrivals bunch up, ClarkNet-HTTP was probably one of the four traces you tested against. It is free and it is bursty in a way synthetic load generators are not. Thirty years later it is still being fed into papers about programmable switches. An ISP that lasted ten years left behind a fortnight of its own server log, and that fortnight has now had a longer working life than the company did.

~ the roll-up ~

Verio bought ClarkNet in late 1997. The Baltimore Sun reported the deal on 21 October, the merger announcement went up on clark.net in January 1998, and for a while very little changed: the brand went, the autonomy mostly stayed, and the original staff kept running the network. Verio was buying local ISPs across the country at speed and ClarkNet was one of dozens.

NTT bought Verio in 2000 for about five billion dollars, and by then the product the parent cared about was web hosting rather than internet access. Over the next three years the ClarkNet staff were let go and the network was sold off or switched off piece by piece, until in 2003 there was nothing operating under the name. On 15 November 2004 the barn burned down in an accident, empty, owned by nobody who had ever run a router in it.

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