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newsletter://mv.com
July 1996
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found on
mv in the public archive; look in /pub/mv/inews. They're also in the
online menu!
A brief history of MV on our fifth anniversary
Incorporated on June 21, 1991, MV Communications is one of the oldest
and most experienced ISPs in existence. During our first five years, we
were one of the first companies to offer affordable Internet access to the
public at large, to offer access at 28.8Kbs, to offer IP access on a casual
dialup basis, to provide domain registration and hosting to shell accounts,
and more.
MV was actually begun in 1987. At that time, Mark Mallett was offer-
ing UUCP connections to his UNIX system zinn which was hosted in the base-
ment office of his house in Litchfield, NH. zinn communicated to the world
over the phone, making UUCP connections to various sites around the coun-
try. Email and usenet news delivered over UUCP was more or less reliable,
but some email could take days and the "more or less" was problematic.
To increase the speed and reliability of local mail, Mark registered
the domain mv.com in late 1987 (no small feat at the time), and established
a UUCP connection to Harvard University. Others in the area connected into
the mv.com domain, and Bruce Dawson volunteered his system in Nashua as
another gateway. By the beginning of 1991, the two gateway systems were
becoming overloaded, as were the budgets of their owners, and the number of
requests for membership was rising dramatically. Bruce Dawson moved away
from Nashua, leaving one mv.com hub system to handle an ever-increasing
volume of email and usenet news.
Mark was faced with the prospect of refusing new connections and pos-
sibly trimming back some existing ones, a course that he believed would
make the mv.com domain experiment a failure. Charging was an alternative,
but something more had to be offered. He began to investigate the idea of
acquiring a direct Internet connection in order to vastly increase the
reliability and performance of electronic mail. At that time, this was a
pretty far-fetched idea. It was very uncertain that it would be possible
to convince enough people that Internet access was worth paying for.
Nevertheless, Mark hornswoggled some friends and associates into trying it,
and in June of 1991 MV was incorporated and moved into its Litchfield
office with a single 386/33 UNIX server and 4 dialin lines. In September,
after several months of delays, a leased line was installed into NEARnet,
and MV began its commercial operation.
A more elaborate history can be found on our web page.
This bill, future bills
For most of you, this bill covers the 4-month period from January 1
through April 30, 1996. After this, we will be transitioning to a new bil-
ling system. This transition will require us to do a great deal of data
conversion and entry of old information into the new system. Some of this
will be fairly easy, but some of it will be fairly tedious and lengthy. If
you're a shell account user you can already see the start of this transi-
tion: your account number has changed. Please note this change when you
record the account number on your check, and please do record that number
so that we can credit your check appropriately.
V.34 modem upgrades
All modems in all hunt groups are now V.34-capable. When we started
purchasing 28.8 modems, the introduction of V.34 was almost a year in the
future, and the V.fc modems we used were designed according to what the
manufacturers believed would be the eventual V.34 standard. This was the
case with all manufacturers of high-speed modems; as we added these V.fc
modems, our customers were also beginning to purchase and use V.fc modems.
When V.34 modems became available, all modems we added to our hunt group
were V.34 . We maintained a mix of V.fc and V.34 modems in several of our
dial-in areas, segregating them so that the V.34 group could be dialed
directly. As we added V.34 modems and gradually sent in older modems for
upgrade, the fraction of V.fc modems became smaller and smaller. Finally
in June we were able to obtain upgrade kits from Microcom and finished the
upgrade process.
Important areas for MV users
All MV users should be aware of several areas to find information.
o Newsgroups: MV maintains several internal usenet newsgroups for
announcements and discussions. (In fact, although they are MV news-
groups, we do distribute them to some other ISPs in the area so that
outsiders can see what's happening in MV if they care to.) The names
of these newsgroups all start with "mv." and include:
mv.forum.general - a general discussion area to be used by MV
users.
mv.forum.dialip - A discussion area for IP account issues.
mv.forum.online - A discussion area for shell account issues.
mv.forum.web - A discussion area for web space issues.
mv.info.outages - Descriptions of outages, both announcements and
reports, posted by MV.
o Web: MV maintains two hierarchies on our web page for the benefit of
MV users:
http://www.mv.com/mv/userinfo - Information of general interest.
This includes policy statements, tips on how to use various MV
facilities, and announcements of upcoming events.
http://www.mv.com/webtools - Some tools to help make use of MV
facilities, focusing on helping you utilize web pages but also
containing some other things (such as an archive of the MV news-
groups)
Be aware that if there are general announcements to be made by MV, these
are done through the newsgroups and through the announcements section of
our web page. To keep up on plans and happenings at MV, please check into
these periodically.
Name the Webletter - Extended Deadline
This is a synopsis of an announcement posted in late May about our
upcoming Webletter. The webletter has been delayed some because of incapa-
citation of its editor-to-be. He'll be back and ready to go soon, so we've
moved the naming deadline back some (also to coincide with its mention
here).
Hi, this is John Ost, editor of the new MV WEBLETTER. We are launching
the online newsletter as part of MV's continuing attempts to provide timely
state-of-the-art services to the MV community. A portion of the letter will
be like a traditional on-line magazine, which is updated bi-monthly or
quarterly. Other segments of the magazine will be dynamic and change daily.
The letter will be interactive, keep you informed about the latest on-
goings inside MV and regularly report on the activities of the MV commun-
ity. To correspond with us, simply send a message to: mv-editor@mv.com
We invite YOU to help us build the MV WEBLETTER and make it a success.
Can you help us with the following? Please send all replies to mv-
editor@mv.com
A name: MV WEBLETTER sounds okay but I bet you can do better. So the
editors at MV would like to hold a "name the WEBLETTER" contest. The MV
user whose name we choose will receive a $50 credit towards their account
AND continuing fame with a permanent place on the WEBLETTER masthead. Two
runner-ups will receive a $20 usage credit. Send your suggestions to mv-
editor@mv.com by August 16, 1996
Suggestions: What would you like to see monthly inside the webletter?
Technology corner, user profiles, MV news and more will become regular
features in the MV WEBLETTER. But what else would you like to see in YOUR
on-line publication?
Beta: Before we release the letter to the entire community we need
volunteers to read our letter, make suggestions and help us make it better
-- something tailored to the needs of our readership.
MV Communications, Inc. PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 429-2223