21 Years As An ISP
July 17, 1994 was the date that Flex Net, operating out of a State of Hawaii incubator called "Kaitech" went online and offering dialup modem access to Oahu users, became the very first Hawaii ISP (before Lava Net, before Pixinet even.)
Do you know flex.com existed and was reachable online before amazon and eBay? Yes it's true.
Knowing now and taking it back to 1994:
1. Save all your money and wait for BITCOIN to be invented. Purchase as much as you can at any price under $1. Sell at $1000 each and don't trust MTGOX. I thought about this whole thing somewhat and realize I would have sold out my bitcoins as soon as it went double in value. But what if I had a website called www.onemillionbitcoins.com where I would pick up a bitcoin for 13 cents (or less) apiece? And I wouldn't sell any till I got a million of them....
2. Turn your BBS passion into the first social media website ever.
3. You got married to someone you found on the internet via your BBS. And you knew a few other couples whom met and married likewise. Start up match.com for gosh sakes...
Haha. Oh well.
Running FlexNet over the past 21 years has been a totally unexpected and surprising ride. I thank you all for that.
FlexNet
P.S. What is this about Flexnet being sold? Nah. False alarm.
5 comments:
Are you interested in selling the domain?
I remember being on aloha.net BBS and signing up for internet as soon as I discovered it. I think dialup was $30 a month back then? I can still search usenet and find old postings under my aloha.net address. Then you changed to shaka.com, then offered DSL service... pretty cool that I was along for the ride all the way to now.
I remember the first websites I came across on the web, before there were any commercial sites, and before the AOL users flooding the net. "Alf's Random Anime Grab Bag" was one of the first pages where I used to download hand-drawn anime pics. I don't think scanners were even a thing yet!
I got some old chat logs from aloha.net that I printed out and it's buried somewhere in my garage. It'll be fun to find them and see what we used to chat about!
Whenever I fill out paperwork and put down my email address with shaka.com on it, people always think it's cool. One receptionist gawked at me one time and said her dad has a shaka.com email and so I must be one of the first internet nerds in Hawaii. I told her yep, I was with the first gang in Hawaii to get on the internet, and that first is forever.
Del, thanks for opening the doors for us back then, and keeping up with the changes!
aloha.com, not aloha.net.
aloha.net was our competitor (Thane Taylor, I think).
We started as B.O.S.S. (Beta Online Star Systems) which had four modems and with me, that meant five people could chat at the same time. I was just a kid back then running it outta my parents' basement. People would donate some money to help me pay for the four phone lines. Then a BOSS user reported me to Hawaiian Telephone about my "business use" and that is when I had to shut the thing down as I couldn't pay the business rates for four phone lines.
A five year break.
Got married.
Hacked my mother in-law's UH Manoa dialup account so that I could do email and some news groups. Got in trouble with UH.
Another 3 year or so break.
Then I started FLEX which means "Free-form Login Expressions" in 1994 with a 56Kbps Frame Relay line from Kaimuki to California. Big big money. Took a risk. FLEX as just a regular single line BBS initially for a few years prior. So when I offered "real" internet connections, I had 500 BBS users, 350 or so actually started paying for monthly access. At $25 a month.
This money was parlayed into more and more modems and faster and faster data internet lines. At one time, we were paying $12K a month for the internet (T1 line, 1500kbps). And $22K a month for the modems. Kinda forgot how many we got, but it was over a hundred 56K modems.
I helped other Hawaii ISPs get online also, sharing expenses with my data line to the mainland.
What a ride.
Were you the SysOp of Flex BBS that was running the Searchlight software?
Shoots.
Now I reply half a year later!!!
Yes, that was me. Searchlight. Flex BBS. now flex.com
yea, what memories down that lane.
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