About POWER.NET

HISTORY

On a bright and sunny saturday morning in the early 1990s in Southern California, Doug checks the tie downs that hold the surfboard on the truck before taking off for the beach. John is washing his Nissan on the grass, again, every week, it is spotless. Karl and Andrea went out to get breakfast. Dirk took his mountain bike to the gym. 19020 Ronald Avenue in Torrance, California, is a single family home shared by four engineers in their late twenties.

A partially dismantled race car sits in the drive way, it will be worked on later today. Parked in the garage is Karl's 15 year old red Porsche and too many tools to fit another car. In the corner, Dirk's server running Linux kernel version 0.82, compiled from source. Four phone lines feed into it, one of them carries a PPP link to netcom. The server hums, day and night, which is why it was exiled into the garage. Much to John's dismay, its screen and keyboard are located in the communal kitchen, on the other side of the wall with a hole.

POWER.NET provides Internet services to a growing number of people, thanks to Karl's efforts in teaching a community class about the Internet and Dirk's efforts in programming a custom menu system that makes it easier for people to navigate the early Internet, before web browsers, in the age of telnet, email and usenet, when the Unix commandline ruled, computer memory measured in kilobytes, hard drive space in megabytes and CPU speed in megahertz, when social networking meant email, usenet, IRC, MUDs and MOOs.

A medical transcription company in Manhattan Beach liked our ideas on how to use the Internet to lower the costs of medical transcriptions. Trading a free T1 for free office space in a windowless storage room on the third floor of 3601 Rosecrans Avenue in Manhattan Beach allowed us to leave the kitchen. We wired the building with ethernet and provided Internet services to many tenants, often including custom Linux routers/firewalls. T1 circuits grew like roots.

When Records Plus was sold we rented the office next door. The new office was too big and too expensive for us, but it shared a wall with Records Plus and moving all those telecom circuits to another location would have been difficult. For a few months, the resulting lack of funds and the need for 24/7 operations meant that the Dirk and Ute slept in the office. Having decided to move back to Michigan, Karl had sold his equity to Dirk.

Part of the office was converted to a highly secure data center and we now offered colocation in addition to network connections. Hughes Aircraft, Boeing and NASA trusted us with servers. Sony connected the Culver City lot with dual T1 circuits. Two medical doctors and a telecom consultant subleased Office+Internet, an early version of today's popular co-working.

Many Internet entrepreneurs discussed their business plans in our offices. A few consumer ISPs became our customers, we focussed on businesses. Elias ran what became www.securityfocus.com from the computer under his desk. Steve sang warsongs while we played Quake against the guys at Sony. Damon and Swindler did who knows what. Jason figured out how to boot from CD-ROMs, two years before Knoppix. Shaun the intern could not believe that we did not need more people for what we did.

In 2000, to improve our connectivity options, we moved from Manhattan Beach to 4676 Admiralty Way in Marina Del Rey, the same building that houses USC's Information Sciences Institutes. USC had taken over the data center of a failed dotcom and for ten years we where able to leverage that infrastructure for our co-location customers.

To gain access to more networks we recently moved routers and servers to One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles. One Wilshire has been called the heart of the Internet on the West Coast, an impressive building in downtown Los Angeles that is a giant network switch with hundreds of networks that can be reached with 1GB, 10GB, or even 100GB, all for the cost of a local fiber.

POWER.NET is a dba for DHM Information Management, Inc., a California Corporation.