Walnut Creek CDROM

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

~ the goodbye ~

Walnut Creek CDROM sold free software for money, which is a business that reads as absurd now and was completely obvious in 1991. The software was free. The delivery was not. Bob Bruce worked out that the gap between those two facts was worth about forty dollars a disc, and built a company inside it.

It started in August 1991 in Walnut Creek, California, pressing the internet's public archives onto CD-ROM and mailing them out. The Simtel shareware collection for DOS went onto a disc, and so did the CICA archive of Windows software. Later there was Aminet for the Amiga and enough of Project Gutenberg to fill a volume. None of it belonged to the company and none of it needed to. What was being sold was six hundred megabytes and the postage, and for anybody on a phone line that was the cheapest bandwidth available anywhere.

The thing that makes this a real company rather than a trick is what happened next. Walnut Creek became the commercial publisher of FreeBSD from its start in 1993 and employed Jordan Hubbard and David Greenman to work on it. It published Slackware. By 1997 FreeBSD was the most successful product in the catalog, which means a shareware repackager had turned itself into one of the load-bearing companies of the free software era almost by accident.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the server ~

ftp.cdrom.com was the busiest FTP server on the internet for years, and it was one machine. A 200 MHz Pentium Pro with a gigabyte of memory and half a terabyte of RAID behind it, running FreeBSD, holding 3,600 simultaneous download sessions and moving something like 750 gigabytes a day. By the end that figure was up around 1.4 terabytes.

The company was, in effect, competing with itself and winning both times. Everything on the discs was on the server for free. The server was the advertisement, and it was the proof that FreeBSD could take a beating no commercial operating system was being asked to take at that scale.

~ the arithmetic ~

Here is the number that made the whole business work. Six hundred megabytes at 33.6 kilobits a second, which is what I had in Turkey around 1999 on a good day, is roughly forty hours of connected time at the theoretical rate. No dial-up line was going to hold that, and the phone was metered by the minute the entire way down. The disc was not a convenience. It was the only method.

Turkey solved this the way most of the world outside American universities solved it, with discs taped to the front of computer magazines. Walnut Creek was the industrial-strength version of the same fact, with better curation and an actual mirror of the source archives. When broadband arrived the number that justified the company went to zero, and it went to zero everywhere at once.

~ how it ended ~

By March 2000 the CD-ROM business was finished as a business and the interesting asset was FreeBSD. Walnut Creek merged with Berkeley Software Design Inc. to put BSD/OS and FreeBSD under one roof, and Bob Bruce spent part of that spring answering a skeptical audience online about why the two operating systems were not about to be collapsed into one.

The Walnut Creek name was gone by 2001. What was left restructured under the name iXsystems, which is still around and still selling storage built on FreeBSD, which is a fair amount of continuity for a company that started out mailing other people's shareware to strangers.

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