NETCOM On-Line Communication Services

» see netcom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

netcom was a us-coded isp brand i never used, headquartered in san jose, sold to americans through shell accounts and the netcruiser bundled dialer. when it started up in 1988 i was four years old in ankara, when it peaked in '96 the dial-up i was using at home ran on turknet. the bay area shell-account isps of that era were a category that existed at one remove from anything a turkish kid would have heard about.

bob rieger and bill gitow founded the company in 1988 around the unix shell-account model that the early commercial isps were built on. you dialed in, you got a prompt on a netcom box, and from there you ran your own pine for mail, your own lynx for the early web, your own ircii for chat. in those days. it was a category of access that assumed the user was already a unix person.

by '95 netcom was running a tcp/ip dialer called netcruiser that let normal customers run windows and the web without ever touching a shell. by '96 the company was claiming around 500,000 subscribers and the title of world's largest isp.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

netcom's early customer base was bay area technical workers and the universities adjacent to it. the shell-account product was cheap and powerful. you got real internet access for a flat monthly fee.

the netcruiser bundle was the move that expanded that base outward into normal home users in '95 and '96. in those days. it shipped on a floppy with a single installer that handled the tcp stack, the dialer, the mail client, the browser. customers who did not want to learn unix could just buy the netcom subscription and click install.

~ the sale ~

icg communications announced a definitive merger agreement on october 13 of '97. the deal was structured as a stock swap, finishing across 1998. icg was a colorado clec building out a fiber backbone and saw netcom as a tenant that could fill some of that capacity. the strategic fit lasted about a year.

in february 1999 icg sold netcom's us assets to mindspring for 245 million in cash and stock. mindspring was running an acquisition tear across the late-1990s isp consolidation. netcom was the largest of the names it folded into the atlanta service. then mindspring itself merged with earthlink in february 2000 and the combined company kept the earthlink brand. really though, two brand changes inside eighteen months was enough that nobody outside billing noticed when the netcom name disappeared.

~ what came after ~

earthlink wound down the legacy shell accounts on september 30 of 2000. that was the actual end of netcom as a service. the @netcom.com email domain kept routing for legacy customers for years after, the same way @mindspring.com would. for the small unix-shell community that had treated netcom as their home isp through the early 1990s, the september '00 cutoff was the moment the door closed.

the netcom name had a strange second life on the international side. icg had spun off the european and canadian operations into a separate netcom internet uk entity that survived into the 2000s under different ownership. the us brand was dead by 2000. the international brand drifted for another few years before getting absorbed into whatever broadband consolidator was buying isps that year. nothing left now.

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