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I think my first isp after using compuserve for a while was netcom. No idea what happened to them but they gave me a shell account and pine and tin and gopher a

• Kadin 17y ago
  I was a Netcom guy also. I used them right up until I got cable HSI service (which in my area wasn't until late '01 or early '02). Netcom as a company disappeared somewhere in the late 90s; I don't know exactly what the story was, but I recall getting a letter saying that I was suddenly going to be a MindSpring customer, and then a few months (or so) later, an EarthLink one. Their domain names and email addresses lived on through all that though, and I still occasionally see an "@ix.netcom.com" floating around. When I finally canceled my service with them, after getting the cable modem installed, I was pretty bummed that they didn't have some minimal level of service that would have just let me keep my email address. (AOL offered something like this at the time.) I probably would have paid $3-5/mo just to hang onto it because I'd had it for so long. Ah, well. They were one of the better dialup ISPs I had; I never had trouble getting access numbers in various cities, and they had fairly responsive support. Quality declined precipitously after the Mindspring/EarthLink buyout though; I had no love for them as a company by the end.