Demon Internet
Vodafone Group | |
Website | www |
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Demon Internet was a British
In 1997 Demon was bought by Scottish Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of the private utility company
From 1996 to 2006 Demon operated a subsidiary ISP business in the Netherlands. It was sold to KPN in June 2006 and its operations transferred to their XS4ALL subsidiary.[2]
In January 2019, Vodafone announced its intention to close Demon and migrate its 15,000 remaining customers to more modern services.[3]
History
This section needs additional citations for verification. (February 2014) |
Demon Internet was born out 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.
Dismissing the idea that the Demon name might upset those with religious convictions, Cliff Stanford laughingly said he had considered getting the numbers "666" incorporated in the dial up.
The original Demon service was hosted using mainly Apricot servers including a gigantic pair of LSI towers named "gate" and "post".
When Demon started,
Its first service was the "standard dial-up" (SDU) - full TCP/IP access on a static IP address with a user chosen 4 to 8 character "nodename" (later 3–16 character "hostname") in the .demon.co.uk domain e.g. example.demon.co.uk. This allowed users to receive SMTP mail and other IP traffic direct to their computers. It was possible to operate independently of Demon or to make use of Demon's mail, news and IRC servers.
Demon was the first ISP to pioneer SDU service priced at £10 a month plus
Demon Internet received a healthy boost in user numbers when the UK Internet Book,
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 automate services for internal and corporate customers, establish Demon as a technical leader in industry forums such as the RIPE,[6] DNS registry communities, e.g. .uk, and emerging open-source development communities[7] etc. Later 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 on 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
Demon's home-dialup focus was also its Achilles heel. The company had some exposure after sponsoring
In 1995, Demon acquired a 25% stake in competing UK Internet provider Cityscape Internet Services, as part of a deal to move Cityscape's backbone from Pipex to Demon.[8] On 29 September, they acquired the remaining 75% of the company.[9]
Demon's early days are described in an interview with Cliff Stanford published in The Independent on 15 January 1996.[10]
The public telephone number of the company, and many of the dialup access numbers, end with 666 (the supposed
This section needs expansion with: details on the last decade of operations. You can help by adding to it. (July 2011) |
Ownership
In June 2008 Cable & Wireless plc made a predatory offer for Demon's parent, Thus. On 1 October 2008, Cable & Wireless completed the takeover of Thus.
Cable & Wireless split into two separate businesses on 26 March 2010. Thus and Demon came under the ownership of the original business, which was renamed Cable & Wireless Worldwide. This was purchased by Vodafone in July 2012 which began integrating the business with its own. Thus and Demon were integrated into Vodafone on 1 April 2013.[11]
During 2016–2019, the Demon Internet service was slowly wound down with a view to migrating customers over to Vodafone branded products, a process that took longer than expected with some customers still being provided with Demon ADSL at the end of May 2019 due to a large backlog in the processing of migration requests.
IRC servers
Demon ran
See also
- Godfrey v Demon Internet Service
- Internet in the United Kingdom § History
- Point-to-Point Protocol
- Post Office Protocol
- Serial Line Internet Protocol
- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
References
- ^ "Obituary:Cliff Stanford". London: Daily Telegraph. 4 March 2022. p. 31.
- ^ "XS4ALL company news item". Archived from the original on 28 June 2011. Retrieved 12 November 2009.
- ^ Orlowski, Andrew (11 January 2019). "Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP". The Register. Archived from the original on 12 February 2019. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
- ^ "Configuring and using Demon KA9Q for MS-DOS". leverton.org. Archived from the original on 25 March 2012. Retrieved 12 September 2011.
- ^ "Google Sites: Sign-in". accounts.google.com. Retrieved 24 April 2023.
- ^ "RIPE 24 Attendees". ripe.net. Archived from the original on 16 September 2017. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
- ^ "AmiTCP FAQ". faqs.org. Archived from the original on 16 September 2017. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
- ^ "Cityscape drops Pipex for Demon deal". Internet Business News. 3 January 1995. Archived from the original on 15 March 2014. Retrieved 15 March 2014.
- The Free Library.
- ^ "Even a millionaire has his demons" Archived 1 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 6 June 2011
- ^ "Changes to your invoices" (PDF). Vodafone. April 2013. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 August 2013. Retrieved 17 April 2013.
- ^ "Demon.uk delinking". QuakeNet.org. Archived from the original on 18 October 2009. Retrieved 22 September 2009.
- ^ "efnet.demon.co.uk and hub.uk delinks - EFnet IRC Network Forum". efnet.org. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011. Retrieved 22 September 2009.