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Demon Internet

Early Days

See also

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Demon Internet

'Demon Internet' is a British Internet Service Provider. It was one of the earliest ISPs, one of the UKs first, especially targeting the "dialup" audience starting on 1 June 1992 from an idea posted on CIX by Cliff Stanford of Demon Systems Ltd. The branch in the Netherlands started in 1996, and was sold to KPN in June 2006.
In the early days users were expected to connect to a BBS and download basic internet connection software based on the KA9Q implementation of TCP/IP. In 1995 the company acquired Chris Hall and Richard Clayton's Turnpike suite for Windows.
Its first service was the "standard dial-up" (SDU) - full TCP/IP access on a static IP address allowing you to receive SMTP mail or any other IP traffic direct to your system. You could operate entirely independently of Demon or make use of the full complement of servers they provided within their network - mail, news, IRC, web-proxies, DNS, etc.
The SDU was priced at £10 a month (£11.75 including VAT), or as it was described in the sales literature, a "tenner a month". They still offer this service at the same price today, but more customers today use ADSL.
In 1998 it was bought by ''Scottish Telecom'', a wholly owned subsidiary of the privatized utility Scottish Power. Scottish Telecom rebranded as Thus plc in October 1999, and floated on the London Stock Exchange. Thus plc fully demerged from Scottish Power in 2002. On the sale of Demon Internet to Scottish Telecom, Cliff Stanford founded the company Redbus.
The public telephone number of the company, and many of the dialup access numbers, end with 666 (the supposed Number of the Beast), a deliberate pun on the name ''Demon''. Also, after a spate of "access" related names (e.g. gate, post) many of its original servers' hostnames started with ''dis'', being the initial letters of ''Demon Internet Services'' as well as the name of a part of Hell in Dante's Inferno and another name for Lucifer.

Early Days

Demon Internet was born of Demon Systems, a bespoke business software development company formed by Cliff Stanford, Grahame Davies and Owen Manderfield. In a discussion of the need for a home-oriented dialup IP service on the CIX boards, Stanford suggested that if 200 people stepped up with a year's subscription, he would use Demon's infrastructure to create such a service.
The original Demon service was hosted using mainly Apricot servers including a gigantic pair of LSI towers named "gate" and "post".
When Demon started WinSock was still a new concept. Most PC users had to use "KA9Q" or "NOS" - a command line style client - to establish their TCP/IP connection to use ftp, gopher, telnet, etc. The Web had not yet arrived.
Thanks to Demon Systems, Demon Internet always had a strong programming team allowing it to create solutions to emerging issues in-house. All three directors were programmers and Stanford wrote many business-critical pieces of software, writing modules to adapt MMDF to Demon's purposes. Mark Turner, originally one of Demon System's developers, wrote many of the accounts and operational systems. As Stanford was increasingly absorbed with corporate activities, Neil McRae eventually took over the work on the Mail System. Oliver Smith moved from Systems to Internet to run and automate services for corporate customers. Later on, Peter Galbavy was brought in to develop solutions for interoperability issues and Ronald Khoo developed low-level networking solutions that allowed the company to run off free operating systems and PC based hardware.
Many other key Demon people started out as developers - Giles Todd, Clive Feather, Richard Clayton.
Armed with so many developers, many of whom made names for themselves within the developing industry, Stanford used the company's ability to contribute its developments to the Open Source community as a means of developing Demon's reputation beyond what its actual Internet Service commanded.
Because the Internet was still a relatively new phenomenon, the domain of academics and geeks, Demon's home-dialup focus was also its Achilles heel. British Telecom were very dubious of Demon's projected growth resulting in a regular shortage of lines and leading to regular re-digs of the top end of Hendon Lane to lay down additional capacity.

See also

★ Standard Dial-up POP3 Service

★ Cliff Stanford

External links

★ Demon Internet

★ Demon NL

★ Thus PLC

★ Demon Demand £153 from customer for Poor service.