Notes from an All-Macintosh ISP —Continued

[CK] I wrote some (for the time) complex FileMaker applications for employers in 1992, and realized that I could probably make some side money doing FileMaker development. I continued with this side business during my tenure at the University of Washington in 1994.

Soon, I told my (then future) wife that I wanted to work freelance and we came up with the digital.forest name around the dinner table one night. Originally, digital.forest was going to be my computer consulting business.

When the Internet was new
When Mosaic was released, I was instantly attracted to the web and poked around the few servers that existed at the time. I taught myself HTML 1.0 in an afternoon and realized I needed to set up a server. Sometime around May or so of 1994, I set up a web server on a spare Mac II we had in the back using MacHTTP. Unbeknownst to me, I had just set up one of the first few thousand web servers on the Internet.

I saw that 'this Internet thing' looked like it was going to go somewhere, and that I knew quite a bit about the Internet, TCP/IP networking, dialup services, and servers. In the local Seattle scene, there were about 10 or 15 companies providing dialup services, and I thought it would be a good business to go into. My spin was that I would do it for Macs only.

I spent most of the summer of 1994 pulling together what I needed: registering domain names, IP addresses, purchasing hardware, configuring hardware, and ordering the 56K line to be strung into my basement. I also raised $7000 from friends and family to get the ball rolling.

I quit my job in September of 1994 and started working on digital.forest full-time. Through the fall I worked on my business plan and did Internet consulting for local businesses while taking care of arranging technical matters. I had hoped to have a holiday launch, but my 56K line was delayed into late December, then early January then was finally turned up the first week of February 1995 and we were open for business.

In short, business sucked for the first few months. Being a network manager, not a marketer, I did a good job of working over my friends for clients, but didn't really think about doing much else.

Dialup was problematic, as the Telebit Netblazer I had did Apple Remote Access calls, but the TCP/IP gateway was a bit dodgy. By April, I resigned myself to supporting regular PPP calls for Macs and Windows.

Colo in the wind
I had a brief flurry of accounts, but I quickly found that my lack of Windows knowledge hampered my ability to do technical support. About the time I was wondering what the heck I was going to do, Westwind Computing (an Apple VAR in Seattle) called and said they had a client who had just bought a web server and that that person needed a place to put it online.

Thus, Macintosh colocation was born for digital.forest. Instead of the $19.95/month dialup accounts I was selling, I was able to charge $300/month to have this box just sitting on my desk. All of a sudden, I had cash flow, and realized that there was more to this that just dialup.

I was able to land a few more colocation boxes before I moved out of my basement in the summer of 1995 to a trailer in a welding yard in Redmond with a web development firm. This was a great deal for me, as they already had a T1 installed, but no one to run it, and I needed a place to refer my clients to for web development.

It was a win-win for both of our firms and we both grew quite quickly during the rest of 1995 and early 1996. Around March or so of 1996, I unplugged the NetBlazer and got out of the dialup market to focus on colocation and providing dedicated ISDN lines in the Seattle area.

The web development firm moved out in the fall of 1996 after securing some funding and I was left alone with the whirring fans and blinking lights of the equipment I took care of.

A good host has good friends
By early spring of 1997, I was going nuts working alone again and swung a deal with Westwind to share some office space with them and build out a new data center there.

1997 was a good year for digital.forest, as the business continued to grow and I was able to hire my first employee. Later in the year, FileMaker was web-enabled, and we started taking calls asking if we would host it.

(As an aside, the web hosting market was just starting in early 1997 as software tools were finally showing up to allow more than one client on a box. Prior to that, the only way to have an effective web site was to have your own server.)

FileMaker hosting really took off, and the business grew accordingly. I started looking for new office space in the summer of 1997, but didn't find anything that would work until 1998, and we moved into our current offices in July 1998. By then, we were up to five people, four of us sharing the same desk and all five of us in an office that was about 10' x 12'.

Keeping it new
Since then we have continued to expand and add staff. Now, we're up to 19 people, and we'll likely be up to 25 or so by the end of the year. We've also branched out and support SQL Server, MySQL, 4D, and other database platforms. We've also built our own data center here, and have a technical foundation that is comparable with other much larger firms. Our networking and technology background shows! While other firms like ours are placing their equipment in other companies' facilities, we've built our own so we have greater control over the client experience.

To sum up, we've always managed to stumble into the Next Big Thing before we or anyone else knew it. I suspect that some of the R&D we're doing on new technologies now will prove to be the same. The key is flexibiility.

If I had doggedly pursued dialup, I likely would have sold out to someone like Earthlink several years ago.

As it is, we're still in charge of our own destiny.

[AG] How did you branch out into security?

[CK] In late 1995, when Apple was trying to be in the Internet server space, there was a lot of noise about how secure the Mac platform was as an Internet platform for serving. Along with a few other firms, we decided to put our money where our mouth was and put up $10,000 for anyone that could crack into a Mac server hosted at digital.forest.

Since then, I've always kept a close eye on the Mac security arena along with following the general industry issues with regards to it.

[AG] Is the ISP business similar to running databases and security services?

[CK] I will say this: the 'S' in ISP stands for service.

Regards,

Chris Kilbourn
President / CTO digital.forest

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