Dragonfire Internet Services: A Retrospective🔒 SSL Verified

Table of Contents

• ↓ Table of Contents
• ↓ 1994: Dreams of Flight
• ↓ 1995: Cracking the Shell
• ↓ 1996: Care and Nurture of a Dragon
• ↓ 1997: Thrust into the Real World
• ↓ 1998: Growing Up
• ↓ Top Alternatives to dragonfire.net

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"From late 1995 through early 1999, I operated a small World Wide Web service provider named Dragonfire Internet Services. In days when personal megabit-class connections were the exclusive province of college students and 10 megabytes of file space was considered huge, I endeavored to, in my own little way, help people take advantage of the new communications medium known as the World Wide Web. While I don’t dare claim any part in how the web grew during that time, my experiences may give a glimpse into those formative years of the present Internet, so I have set down, as best I can recall, the history of Dragonfire from my point of view. I hope that the reader finds this retrospective as interesting as the experiences themselves were for me."

"While Dragonfire did not come into existence as a provider until late 1995, its story properly begins nearly one year earlier, on December 24, 1994. This was the day I obtained my first semi-permanent Internet connection, via my high school’s dial-in lines."

"To provide some background for those unfamiliar with the technology of the day, personal Internet connections in the early 1990s—​for those few who had them—​were made almost exclusively over standard, land-based telephone lines, using devices known as “modems” to convert data to sound and back again. A typical modem of the time operated at 2400 bits per second (usually called “2400 baud”, though this usage of “baud” is technically incorrect1); since each 8-bit byte was accompanied by two control bits, data transfer was limited to a maximum of 240 bytes per second. At this rate, for example, one could watch E-mail text appear line by line on BBSes or similar text-based systems. Transferring a five-megabyte audio recording, a file size which itself was gigantic for the time, would have taken nearly six hours!"

"By 1994, higher-speed modems had begun to percolate down from research laboratories into the commercial world, and late that year I finally obtained my own 19.2-kilobit modem. The speed difference was amazing; for a 2008 equivalent, imagine switching from an unstable ADSL connection to a dedicated fiber-optic link. Not only were file transfers shortened by an order of magnitude, but that speed also allowed me to work on a remote computer almost as easily as on my own system. The display was not instantaneous, but reading mail or editing programs was much more tolerable than it had been; at least I no longer had to wait nearly ten seconds just to view the next page of a file."

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Table of Contents

1994: Dreams of Flight

1995: Cracking the Shell

1996: Care and Nurture of a Dragon

1997: Thrust into the Real World

1998: Growing Up