Video On Line

» see vol.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

By the time I dialed into anything this was already finished. Video On Line ran about eighteen months as an independent company and had been inside Telecom Italia for two and a half years before I got my first modem.

Nicola Grauso owned L'Unione Sarda, the daily newspaper in Cagliari. In march 1994 he put it on the web with help from CRS4, the Sardinian research center then directed by Carlo Rubbia, and it is generally counted as the first european newspaper to go online. Having done that, he concluded that the missing piece was not content. It was access. The official history of Video On Line starts on 4 december 1994.

Within a year it had roughly fifteen thousand subscribers. That number sounds small until you set the other one beside it: about thirty percent of every italian internet user was his customer. Italy in 1995 was a country whose entire online population would have fit inside a football stadium, and one publisher from Sardinia had a third of it.

I have no italian anchor for this and will not invent one. What I recognize is the shape. Every country got one of these, an operator who moved first while the incumbent telephone company was still deciding whether the internet counted as a product, and who then found out that the incumbent owned the lines and wrote the invoices. Turkey resolved it the other way around, with the incumbent simply becoming the internet, which is why TTNet was on my bills for most of two decades.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cover disks ~

The distribution was the clever part and it was aggressively physical. VOL access disks went out taped to Panorama and to Il Sole 24 Ore. They also went out taped to Topolino, which is the italian Mickey Mouse comic. Attached to the disk was an offer of several months of free internet access dialed through a toll-free number. A reader could go from never having heard the word to being online without paying anybody.

The software stack was homegrown too. VOLmail is described in the italian record as the first commercial webmail on the web. There was a browser called Tiber, built by Teknema and handed out with the kit. There was a search engine named VOLume and a download archive called VOLftp that set out to be the italian answer to Tucows. The site ran in twenty six languages, because Italy was never the whole plan.

~ what really happened ~

Free access on a toll-free number is an excellent way to acquire subscribers and a terrible way to stay solvent, because the calls are real and somebody posts you the bill. That somebody was Telecom Italia. The debt grew faster than the subscriber base could ever cover, and in june 1996 Telecom Italia took the company.

It was not switched off. It was absorbed, which for a brand is the same outcome with better manners. VOL was merged with the Telecom On Line division and the result was Tin.it, the provider most italians actually remember. The older name stopped meaning anything within a couple of years.

~ the long tail ~

Parts of it kept moving. The setup was packaged as an exportable kit and sold abroad, and Czech On Line was built on the technology. VOLftp outlived the company entirely, passing to Exol SpA and then to Mondadori before ending up at Tiscali, which is itself a Cagliari company started by another Sardinian who thought the phone company was doing it wrong.

Grauso died on 18 may 2025 at 76. The italian obituaries all led with the same line, that he was the man who brought the internet to Italy. That is the kind of credit which tends to arrive only once the company is far enough in the past to be safe to praise.

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