It was becoming obvious to everyone that public access to the Internet was going to become a reality. But out in the middle of the desert, we were not sure how it would ever be worth the money for anyone to bring it to us. One day our local phone company (US West) announced that a town a few miles away could become a local call for those who would pay a few additional dollars per month. A friend of mine who lived in that town suggested that the two of us split the cost for a dedicated phone line between Portland Oregon and my house and put (at the time ) very expensive 28.8 bps modems on both ends of it to get net access to my house. I would pay for and provide the support for whatever additional hardware was required at my house. He would pay for a line in his home and my home so he could piggy back on the link to Portland. It seemed like a good idea, so after some investigation, I ordered the phone line and spent close to $1000 each for a pair of modems. I also bought a computer for a terminal server and installed LINUX on it. However, we lived in a couple of small towns in the middle of nowhere, and as we talked (bragged?) to others about our clever idea other people asked if they could also have access to the link. When my friend and I discussed it, his answer was that he did not care what I did, but he was not interested in being in the Internet access business.

When we told other people we really did not want to be in the Internet business the response was often of the form that we were acting like children who would not share their toys. So, eventually I decided to install some additional phone lines, buy four 14.4 modems, and allow other people to use the link.

We came online in November of 1994 and at the time called ourselves mtjeff.com. It seemed like a good name, because from my house and much of Jefferson county Oregon, you could look to the west and see Mount Jefferson dominating the view.

It was not very long until I had ordered four more phone lines and bought more modems. But this time they were expensive USR courier modems because it was obvious that the rotten copper in our old rural phone lines needed all the help it could get from good modems. We then just sort of muddled along for a while. We had up to eight people at a time plus ourselves accessing the net through a 28.8 modem line. But remember this was when someone accessing the web was just as likely to be using lynx as mosaic (the program Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Explorer, etc. are based upon). Then our world started to change.

While this was going on, an online friend asked if we would host a web page that provider after provider kept bouncing off of their systems because it was creating too much traffic. After looking at his logs we decided that if we got a T1 line we would have plenty of bandwidth for the site. Plus there would be plenty of bandwidth left over and we could get serious about web hosting and so could he. After some discussion and lots of agony we made an agreement and ordered our first T1 line. While the order was being scheduled by US West, my friend asked if he could move some smaller sites to our server before the T1 was installed. After looking at even more web logs we decided that we should be able to do it because we had plenty of outbound bandwidth available. So we moved his websites to our web server. Again we just muddled along while waiting for the T1 to be installed until my friend wanted to add more web sites. We added a few more and then his increasing bandwidth requirements plus our own started to reach the limits of a 28.8 bps modem connection. We started to panic. Our response was falling apart, my friend's web clients were getting upset about the mythical T1 that did not seem to be appearing, our few web clients felt the same way and there was enough inbound traffic requesting web pages (that we did not have the bandwidth to deliver) that it was interfering with our dialup lines (all eight of them). Then US West dropped a bomb on us. They did not have the facilities to install a T1 line at our location. They quoted PUC regulations, mentioned things that we considered about as relevant as the price of tea in China, and talked at length about lots of other things we did not care a whit about. We kept saying "we have a contract with a delivery date and price". Eventually the T1 was installed in May of 1995. US West told us that they had done us a huge favor because they had to pretend that the line was at a big central office in downtown Portland and "trunk" it to us. We were told later that all or almost all the digital lines in Oregon at that time really originated at that central office site anyway. However, by the middle of the summer it was becoming apparent that we were going to run out of bandwidth again. My friend seemed to be on a mission to corner the world of web site hosting. I was told in 1996 that we had the largest collection of commercial websites in Oregon. We had sites representing people on every continent except Antarctica and we once had a promotion of offering free web hosting to anyone who was really located in Antarctica.

It was very expensive to install T1 lines at our location that was miles from anywhere out in the desert. We decided that we should put a POP in downtown Portland Oregon near the US West central office where all the digital lines in Oregon were really located. We called that POP solid.net. As soon as we made that decision, in our minds we started dividing our business between those things that should be at home and those things that should be in Portland. Thus Solid.net was born and first registered in August 1995. We did not get around to creating the POP in Portland for a long time. Nor did we publicly distinguish between mtjeff.com and solid.net in any meaningful way, the domain we used just indicated where the server should have been located.

Also by late summer of 1995 I had realized that my friend in the next town was right about not wanting to be in the front lines of customer support for a dialup business. So in August we partnered with a local computer store to create yet another domain to support dialup users. The computer store installed modems in people's computers, configured those computers for net access, and provided the initial level of customer support. (This was in the days of Windows 3.1 and early Windows 95. Things were not as seamless then as they are now. Customer support was a significant problem.) We provided the background server support, installed more and more phone lines in my house, and did things like testing bad telephone lines. It worked out reasonably well for both us and the store. I moved from the desert in 1998. When I did, I sold mtjeff.com and my share of the dialup domain to the computer store and they merged mtjeff.com into the other domain. At that point I completely quit using the mtjeff.com domain and Solid.net became the primary domain I used for my business services.

I hope the preceding has adequately described the relationship between mtjeff.com and solid.net. Some people have had questions about it. I hope it is obvious that in our eyes, until late 1998 they were basically the same entity. I also hope people understand why we sometimes say solid.net has existed since November of 1994.

The history since then is not as interesting. We have watched lots of competitors come and go. We have watched some of our clients move their sites to competitors because the competitor was willing to serve their sites and lose money. We don't quote anything without at least the possibility of breaking even. We don't do our clients or potential clients any favors if we give them such a good deal that our business can't provide the services we have agreed to provide.

Now in 2003 the industry seems to finally coming out of the dot com bomb that has been plaguing us the last couple of years. Hopefully, our competitors of the future will use a business model that includes the idea that they have to price their services at a level that does not lose them money. We intend to still be in business in another 10 years and who knows how many years after that. We also intend to provide a quality product during that time. It will be easier if we don't have competitors who are going bankrupt right and left.

If you would like a dedicated server, would like to have your web pages on one of our servers, or would like to discuss one of our other services, send an email message to newservice@solid.net with a note about what services you need. Within 48 hours we can usually have a server configured for your needs.

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last changed 25-May-03