Netcom (United States)

NETCOM On-Line Communication Services, Inc. was an Internet service provider headquartered in San Jose, California.

It was established in 1988 by Bob Rieger, an information systems engineer for Lockheed and Bill Gitow of System V. Netcom started off in San Jose, California as a service to allow local students to access university networks off-campus. The original accounts were all dialup shell accounts on Intel 80386 Tandy PCs running Xenix, with email addresses in the format of user@netcom.com. Netcom soon served 95% of the San Francisco Bay Area.

When first launched, Rieger was the only system administrator for the company. Users would call him early in the morning to fix Internet access issues until he hired night staff. In 1992, the company was incorporated.

As the World Wide Web became more popular, and users were looking for an easy way to surf the Web, Netcom released a Windows 3.1 based program called NetCruiser (originally it was to be called Internet Xpress, but there were legal issues with calling it by that name, so it was changed in the latter part of development - although the email addresses were still kept user@ix.netcom.com). The NetCruiser service became very popular and made Netcom one of the leading Internet service providers by the mid-1990s. Netcom also had business T1, Frame Relay, UUCP, and dedicated dialup services.

In February 1995, Rieger turned the presidency of Netcom over to David W. Garrison, formerly of SkyTel. Under his direction, the company ventured into the business services market with web hosting and high-speed business connectivity products.

In December 1995, Netcom Canada, a subsidiary of Netcom On-line, was launched in Toronto, Ontario, with Ron Close as its CEO. Netcom Canada boasted a Canada-wide network, and allowed U.S. Netcom customers to access their Internet accounts via their network using either NetCruiser or any PPP dialer. It was the first Internet service provider in Canada to become EBITDA positive.

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