Oslonett

» see oslonett.no as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The founding document is an email, and the founders kept it. Kjell Øystein Arisland sent it at 21:10 on 9 December 1991 to fifteen colleagues, subject line Oslonett A/S, telling them they were invited to take part in founding an important Norwegian informatics company. The meeting was three days later, 12 December, at seven in the evening, in seminar room 3B of the informatics building at Gaustadalleen 23 in Oslo. Everyone who came in put up five thousand kroner of share capital and committed to a number of unpaid hours of work over the following year.

Sixteen people signed, drawn from the three computing outfits that shared that building. Two of them were parts of the university, its informatics institute and its central IT center; the third was Norsk Regnesentral, the national computing research body. Two more partners from Norsk Regnesentral joined later, which made eighteen. Arisland ran it as managing director until the summer of 1993 and chaired it afterward, with Tore Solvar Karlsen taking over as managing director and staying to the end. Gisle Hannemyr built the access product and drew the company logo.

From 1993 it sold internet access to private individuals and small businesses, which nobody in Norway had done commercially before, and at first only in the Oslo area. The first server was a Sun 3/60. It grew to a SPARCstation 10 by the time of the Lillehammer Olympics in February 1994, where Oslonett's coverage took more than 1.3 million accesses and the production system behind it had been written by Anders Ellefsrud over a single afternoon and evening. Staff went from one person in 1993 to forty-five in 1995. By the sale it had nearly ten thousand paying access customers.

Schibsted bought the company on 1 September 1995 and the brand became Schibsted Nett immediately. The founders are blunt about why they sold. Organic growth could not supply the muscle they needed, and when they went looking for venture capital the Norwegian venture market of 1995 turned out to be completely uninterested. Schibsted had actually wanted to build a dial-up walled garden in the shape of AOL. Two things in 1995 talked it out of that, by its own account: Netscape going public that autumn, and Europe Online going bankrupt while Schibsted executives were on their way to visit it.

~ the case file ~

~ the gentleman's agreement ~

Oslonett customers could not run the internet on their own machine. They dialed in, got a terminal session on a UNIX box in Oslo, and browsed the web through lynx in a text window. The founders are careful to record why, because the equipment was perfectly capable of more. It was an understanding with Telepost Communications, the state telecoms side, that Oslonett would not hand a customer a TCP/IP connection of their own.

So the first commercial internet in Norway was a character-mode internet reached through somebody else's computer, and the company's main engineering work was the software that papered over this. Otto Milvang wrote the terminal programs and a TCP/IP proxy called remsock, and Hannemyr wrote a menu front end before assembling the first complete end-user kit, a browser packaged with mail and dial-up networking, for when the restriction eventually lifted.

~ the marketplace ~

Oslonett Markedsplassen went up in the autumn of 1993, directly inspired by O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator. It is often called Norway's first web shop and it was not one. It was a hosted directory of advertisers, an alphabetical list with an icon and a short blurb for each, later re-sorted by industry, with Oslonett building and hosting the pages for the customer.

What it contained was more interesting than what it was. Norwegian Library House ran an academic bookshop inside it, probably the first online bookshop in Norway, and the tour operator Arctic Adventours was nominated in 1994 for Best of the Web in the best commercial service category. Digital Equipment and the Brønnøysund company register were customers. ComputerWorld and Morgenbladet ran web editions off Oslonett servers from late 1993, though the founders never counted those as Markedsplassen clients. The money was never in any of it: access paid the bills, and the board spent time arguing about whether the web deserved real resources at all.

Norway's search directory came out of the same building. Kvasir was sketched at an Easter meeting in 1995 on the Yahoo model. Steinar Kjærnsrød had the concept, Gisle Aas programmed a working version in a few hours, and the Norse name was suggested by Aas's mother.

~ who ended up with it ~

Schibsted Nett lasted about sixteen months as a name. On 8 November 1996 Schibsted and Telenor Online announced they were combining into Scandinavia Online, operative from 1 January 1997, with Telenor taking over the access customers. By March 1997 the competition authority was still reviewing the transfer of what had grown to fifty thousand internet subscribers. At the ten-year reunion Arisland gave his own verdict on who had indisputably profited most from Oslonett and everything Oslonett set in motion, and the answer was Telenor.

Schibsted also neglected to protect the name or the domain. In 1997 an unrelated company registered itself as Oslonett, took oslonett.no, offered many of the same services, and used a logo the founders describe as confusingly like their last one. That second Oslonett is also dead now. Anything you find archived at oslonett.no from 1998 onward belongs to it, not to the company described here, which is why the original founders built their history at oslo.net and signed it Oslonett TRT.

~ what norway kept ~

On 1 December 2014 the Norwegian Arts Council admitted Oslonett's web pages from 1993 and 1994 to Norges dokumentarv, the national register that feeds UNESCO's Memory of the World. It was the first website ever entered. The citation says, in Nynorsk, that Oslonett was the first commercial website in Norway.

Ask oslonett.no for anything today and an IIS server returns 731 bytes in two languages: Inaktiv web, oslonett.no har for tiden ingen web. The name may have other active services, it adds, such as email.

The route Oslonett took is the one a lot of countries took. The internet lands inside a university, the people who run the machines there work out that strangers will pay for access, and a company falls out of the computing department before the phone company has settled on an opinion about it. My own first connection came seven years after this one and from Turkey, over a modem slow enough to make a text-only browser sound like a kindness. That step had already been taken by then, everywhere, and I had no idea it had been a step.

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