Setting up an Internet service provider and a commercial Internet service is a huge task. So I broke the job down into smaller, understandable chunks. Each chunk had its own milestone: a thing that was to be accomplished, and a date by which it was supposed to be accomplished.

On a piece of paper, I sketched out my first set of goals and milestones:

The key ingredient in much of this was having working phone lines—something that the house didn’t have when we moved in. Before we had closed on the house, we had placed an order for four residential phone lines—after all, the house was first and foremost a residence. I had also made arrangements with a mid-level ISP in Cambridge called CentNet for a 56K connection to the Internet that would be delivered over a four-wire DDS frame relay connection. To make this whole thing work I had obtained a Cisco 2509 router—a basic Cisco router with two high-speed serial ports, eight low-speed asynchronous serial ports, and an Ethernet.

I waited for and met the NYNEX telephone installer on the day that our residential phone lines were due to be installed. The man wanted to run four separate lines from the telephone pole to the house. I told him that probably wouldn’t be enough, as we were having the 56K leased-line installed as well as additional lines as time went on. The installer said that he could bring in a 12-pair cable, which, he thought, would last us for quite a while.

A week later, the 56K line was put in place. I plugged in a CSU/DSU that I bought from CentNet and plugged the Cisco into the CSU/DSU. The first thing that I learned was that my Cisco was running a version of Cisco’s operating system that was many months out of date. We downloaded a new version of the operating system over the frame relay connection and set up my network with an IP address in CentNet’s CIDR block. Logging into the Cisco router from my laptop, I could Telnet to my UNIX workstation (and old NeXTstation) that was still at my old house in Cambridge.

The next day, I moved the NeXTstation from Cambridge to Martha’s Vineyard, saying good-bye to my old ISP and hello to my new provider. The house in Cambridge had its own Class C network (204.17.195) and I had wanted to keep using those IP addresses. Unfortunately, some sort of strange routing problem cropped up, and I didn’t have real Internet connectivity with my old Class C network until the next day. Mail bounced because we didn’t have an MX server specified in the DNS configuration.