“The wide open vistas of the internet be came available. It was hair-shirt and roll-your-own”
I just received the news that Cliff Stanford has died. His name will be remembered by those of us in the UK who were around in the 1990s, during the dawn of the public internet, which no doubt includes many readers of this column.
A little bit of history is in order. In 1990, I first started writing for the long-defunct fortnightly magazine PC User. From there I helped found Windows Magazine at Dennis Publishing, which morphed into PC Pro after Microsoft took umbrage at its name. Back then, everybody was on a bulletin board system called CIX, short for Compulink Information eXchange. I still fondly remember the chats with dna@cix, the irreplaceable Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s fame. For others, being able to chat to Terry Pratchett offered a unique insight into his books. The list of names goes on and on.
Back then, CIX was a dial-up bulletin board. It was hosted on its own server with a bank of modems. In the earliest days, you navigated its various forums, or rooms, via a command prompt telnet window. In one such forum, called “tenner_a_ month”, a certain Cliff Stanford suggested that it might be fun to set up an internet service provider to allow access to UUNET in the USA, and thus to all of Usenet. He asked a bunch of us Cixen, as we were known, if we would stump up a tenner a month to fund this, hence the name for the forum. At the time, Cliff had a small business computer company in North Finchley, and I believe it supplied early accountancy packages based on the Apricot platform. I visited the place not long after, and
