SpryNet

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

~ the last words ~

SpryNet was a North American product at the phone number layer. Its entire proposition was a list of local access numbers you could dial without paying long distance, and not one line on that list was in Ankara. In the autumn of 1998, while MindSpring was buying its subscribers, I was dialing a Turkish number on a 33.6k modem and paying a Turkish ISP for the same thing under a different name.

The company underneath it was Spry Inc, in Seattle, run by David Pool. Spry wrote the software that got Windows machines onto the internet back when Windows could not do it by itself, and in 1994 it packaged that with O'Reilly and sold it as Internet in a Box. The box held a TCP/IP stack and a Winsock, a licensed build of Mosaic called AIR Mosaic, mail and news clients, and a printed copy of Ed Krol's Whole Internet User's Guide.

Spry was the first company to license the Mosaic source code. CompuServe bought it in March 1995 for a hundred million dollars, forty million in cash and sixty million in H&R Block stock, and left it in Seattle with its 130 employees. SpryNet launched under that ownership on 6 February 1996, unlimited access for $19.95 a month, worldwide through local numbers.

The pricing tells you exactly what year it was. CompuServe's own service was still metering people. SpryNet, owned by CompuServe, was not, because by 1996 what the customer wanted to buy had stopped being a place and become a pipe.

~ the record ~

~ what it sold ~

Access, and nothing else. No forums, and no CompuServe numeric address with a comma in the middle of it. You got a dial-up account with a local number and the open web on the other end, which in early 1996 was still a thing that had to be explained to people before they would pay for it.

It worked well enough. SpryNet passed two hundred thousand subscribers, which put it in the same size bracket as the independent ISPs of the period without ever having the brand that any of them had. It was CompuServe's own escape hatch from CompuServe, and both things sat on the same balance sheet.

~ what really happened ~

The end was a corporate reshuffle that had almost nothing to do with how SpryNet was performing. WorldCom bought CompuServe in a deal that closed on 31 January 1998. It kept the network for itself and handed the consumer online service to AOL. That left AOL holding a walled service and a second dial-up ISP it had never asked for.

So AOL sold it. MindSpring announced the agreement in September 1998 and closed it on 15 October, taking roughly 180,000 individual subscribers across the United States and Canada along with the support operation and network facilities in Seattle. Prices reported at the time ran between $35 million and $45 million, about $250 a head. MindSpring's own filing put the cash at $25 million. Either way the unit being counted was a person with a modem.

~ what replaced it ~

MindSpring merged with EarthLink in 2000, so SpryNet's customers became EarthLink customers inside eighteen months of being sold. The brand did not survive the transfer and was never meant to. What Spry left behind is the older thing: Internet in a Box was one of the first serious attempts to sell a person the internet as an object with a price sticker, and the reason it stopped selling is that Microsoft put the same stack into the operating system and gave it away.

By the time I got online in 1998, that argument had been over for years. Dial-up networking came with Windows. Nobody in Turkey was ever going to order a box from Seattle to get a Winsock, and by then nobody in Seattle was buying one either.

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