Nildram

» see nildram.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The name is a pun twice over. Adrian Mardlin had a day job programming in a 4GL called Sculptor and was writing his own software in the evenings, and one of those evening projects was a memory-resident menu system for DOS. Its selling point was that it took almost no RAM, which in the parlance of the day made it nil DRAM. It was also his surname backwards. He put it out as shareware, and by his own account that is where the company starts, in 1988. The limited company was not registered at Companies House until 8 January 1997, so the early dating here is the founder's rather than the registrar's.

He went full time in 1991 and set up in Tring, in Hertfordshire, with a computer, a modem and a bulletin board called the Shareware Support BBS. The operation ran at two or three people for several years, splitting its time between the board, its own software, and distributing American titles in Britain. At one point Nildram was the UK agent for Epic MegaGames, which is now Epic Games and owns Fortnite, a sentence that gets stranger the longer you look at it.

1995 is when it became an internet company. It bought a 64 kilobit leased line for fifteen thousand pounds a year, put six modems in the Tring office, and sold dial-up at ten pounds a month. It roughly doubled every year on word of mouth. By 2000 it had outgrown Tring and moved to Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, with over thirty staff, and new customers were arriving at about a hundred a day as ADSL arrived.

The thing it was known for was being good, which is not usually a durable business strategy but worked for a while. Its marketing manager Iain Ogilvie gave it a motto in 1998, Real service in a virtual world, and the company behaved as though somebody meant it. Nildram took the view that its most demanding customers, the gamers who paid the least and complained the most, were the ones to optimize for, on the reasoning that if you keep the worst one percent happy the other ninety-nine percent never have anything to complain about. The independent evidence backs the reputation up. It came first in the ADSLGuide speed tables in September 2002 and was still the fastest UK ADSL provider measured in August 2003, while Which? put it fourth of the top eight ISPs in February 2006 on 77 percent customer satisfaction. PC Pro gave it a Highly Commended in its 2006 awards, where 89 percent of its customers said they would recommend it against an industry average of 73.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shareware years ~

Being the UK agent for an American shareware publisher was a real job in the early nineties and it is a job that no longer exists. Software crossed borders on physical media, and somebody in the destination country had to hold stock, take orders, handle the currency and answer the phone.

The same Epic MegaGames titles reached Turkey, where I was, with no agent of any kind. They arrived on copied floppies and on magazine cover discs, passed hand to hand, detached from whoever had made them and from anybody who might have been paid. Two countries, the same files, and in one of them there was a company in Hertfordshire with a support number. Distribution is mostly invisible until you compare two places that had the same thing on different terms.

~ sold, and sold, and sold ~

On 9 August 2004 Pipex Communications announced it had bought AccentUK Limited, which traded as Nildram, for 12.9 million pounds in cash funded out of its Bank of Scotland facilities. The numbers in that announcement are the only hard figures that exist for the business: 35,000 ADSL customers at the end of July 2004, an estimated 30 percent of them business, turnover of 14.1 million pounds in the year to March 2004, and EBITDA of 366,563 pounds. Nildram was to stay a separate division under its existing management.

It did not stay anything for long. Pipex sold its consumer broadband business to Tiscali in 2007, and in November that year Nildram was writing to customers to reassure them nothing would change. Carphone Warehouse bought Tiscali UK in 2009, and from September that year the Nildram homepage was welcoming its own customers to Opal, TalkTalk's business division. By February 2010 the Nildram logo on its own front page had been replaced with one whose alt text read Opal company logo. Customers were moved onto Opal's platform in September 2010, which went about as well as these things go.

~ the brand after the brand ~

The legal entity and the brand died in the wrong order. NILDRAM LIMITED, company number 03299919, went into a solvent members' voluntary liquidation in January 2010 and was dissolved on 18 August 2011. But the brand was still being sold after the company that bore the name had been wound up: the last Nildram-branded business broadband page was still live on 1 November 2011, and by 16 December it redirected to a TalkTalk Business page for existing customers. That is the end, and it is a bracket rather than a date. Nobody announced anything at all; the sales page simply became a support page.

There was an odd interlude in the middle of all this. On 1 February 2005 Pipex swapped the names around, so the trading company became Nildram Communications Limited while a Pipex shell took the name Nildram Limited, and then swapped them back on 30 January 2006. The shell is still an active company today under a different name again.

~ who wrote the last page ~

nildram.co.uk today serves a small site, generated with Hugo in 2026, whose front page says the Nildram brand is no longer in operation and points people at two places for support. Behind it is a history page that tells the whole story above, with photographs and short biographies of five named people: Mardlin, Ogilvie, two from the technical side and the man who built the front end. It records what each of them went on to do afterward, which in several cases was another small British hosting company, and in one case a hotel on the edge of Dartmoor.

The domain is still registered to TalkTalk's corporate registrar, but its nameservers point at the founder's own company, which is how a memorial came to be published on an address the dead brand's last owner still holds. Between 2012 and 2018 the same domain served nothing but a one-line echo of an internal Tiscali hostname. Somebody who was there decided that was not a good enough ending and wrote a better one on the same URL.

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