Company Information
The Red Shift Network is supported by a capable and motivated staff who responds to your needs. Free phone-in support is available 365 days a year. Customer Care hours are between 8AM – 7PM, Monday – Friday; 9AM – 5PM Saturday – Sunday; and on holidays from 10AM – 4PM. The Red Shift network is monitored 24/7 by our network specialists who are always on call.
The support staff has also compiled a wealth of useful information on-line that will enable you to quickly find answers to the most frequently asked questions.
| Red Shift locations: | |
|---|---|
| Contact Numbers & E-mail | |
|---|---|
| Monterey Phone: | (831) 655-8710 |
| Salinas Phone: | (831) 755-7700 |
| Toll Free: | (888) 473-3744 |
| Fax: | (831) 642-6530 |
| Support Email: | support@redshift.com |
| Sales Email: | sales@redshift.com |
Red Shift’s History
This is the history of Red Shift and how its three original principals played their parts from the first Internet related service offered in 1990 to the present day.
In October of 1990, Karl Van Lear, sysop of a Bulletin Board System (BBS) named Nitelog, instituted the first known Internet Email and Usenet news service on the Monterey Peninsula as a service of Nitelog BBS. Back in those days there were about forty ISPs in the entire world: BBN, Alternet, Netcom, Whole Earth in SF, PSI and UU.net were among some of the earliest pioneers.
Karl purchased a UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program) account from Netcom and put his mind to setting up Internet email between Netcom and Nitelog. During the process Karl actually got support help from Bob Rieger on one occasion (the original owner of Netcom). Setting up the service proved to be difficult but after about three weeks of frustration and long distance calls to the support staff of Netcom (only one guy at that time) he got it working. The service was clunky by comparison with the quality of email these days, but it worked. It wasn’t real-time either. Nitelog would dial Netcom about eight times per day to send mail it had queued and pick up mail waiting for Nitelog customers.
At the same time Tony is working towards a Masters Degree In Aerospace Engineering and working for time as Systems Administrator.
In 1992 Karl met John Clarke for the second time and the two conversed back and forth regularly about the Internet. Like Karl, John had an account with Netcom in their early days. John remembers when Netcom only had a single machine and he had an account on it. Karl and John spoke often about offering expanded Internet access in the Monterey area.
During the latter half of 1992 Karl asked Netcom about a permanent connection so that he could get/receive email and Usenet in real-time. Netcom refused to sell Karl a dedicated line because he was a competitor, albeit small at the time and servicing a market that Netcom said they would never bring access into. They called us “A small island in the south beyond a nearly impenetrable barrier”. This barrier they were referring to is the Pacific Bell LATA boundary just south of Watsonville. This LATA boundary makes it impossible to get a T1 or DS3 circuit from San Jose to Monterey without Herculean efforts involving Pacific Bell on one or both ends, a long distance reseller and the actual owner of the long distance portion of the circuit in between. You end up dealing with three or more separate telco companies who don’t like each other much and don’t cooperate. This situation has not improved to this day.
Netcom did eventually expand to Monterey in the early fall of 1994.
Karl asked John about other options for a leased line that John knew about via his own independent research. Karl found that everyone wanted a sum close to the Gross National Product of Sweden for a T1 circuit. Most providers flat out refused to sell Karl a dedicated line, using the same argument as Netcom. At that time the Internet was still owned by the government and there were many restrictions on commercial providers. The obstacles proved too great for Karl to overcome in 1992 and by November of 1992 he had exhausted all known options. Lack of an interested backbone provider, lack of local market interest and lack of a government sponsor* proved to be barriers of insurmountable height that year. The time just wasn’t right yet.
* In 1992 you could not get access to the Internet without a government organization sponsoring your company and you had to agree to a litany of limitations.
John Clarke was interested in the same thing at the same time and found the same barriers and was also thwarted in his desire to become involved in the retail sale of Internet access in some fashion in Monterey that year. John pursued such access from many avenues, working with Nitelog was just one of the companies he had contacted about getting dedicated access to the Monterey area. During late 1993 or early 1994, John spoke with a provider called TLG (The Little Garden) regarding a promising option. They offered to setup a leased line for him for what at the time was a pretty reasonable fee. John was unable to do it on his own and for whatever reason that fate had in mind, John did not mention the offer to Karl at the time.
In 1993, Tony Cricelli, independently of John and Karl came up with the idea of offering dialup, real time Internet service in the Monterey area as well and pursued many plans of his own to bring his ambitions to market. He had contemplated starting up an ISP on his own in his garage in Monterey. Again, the obstacles in place at that time proved a formidable barrier to his efforts.
Flashback to early 1993: Karl felt that the Internet would eventually take the place of BBSes and decided that it was now or never to get that leased line. Even though he was unsuccessful in his efforts of a few months ago, he again began laying out plans for a leased line to the Internet. John lent Karl documents to help in finding a source for a leased line. None of the leads led to success. It was a full 18 months later in the summer of 1994 that Karl found two providers willing to sell him a T1 dedicated line in Monterey.
While visiting a Usenet Newsgroup called “alt.internet.access.wanted” in July of 1994, Karl wrote down the phone numbers of every provider he found that offered leased line access. He called them all. Only Scruz.net out of Santa Cruz, and California Online (later renamed West Coast Online) out of the San Joaquin Valley could or would sell the line to Karl. During August and September Karl approached other BBSes and individuals in the Monterey area to gain their interest in sharing the access and expenses of setting up an ISP in the Monterey market. What Karl wanted to do was a very risky venture at the time. The market in Monterey was untested. Any money spent on the new company could very well disappear quickly and forever. This proved too much risk for others in the online services industry in this area and no partners could be found.
Karl signed the contract with Scruz.net in September of 1994 and funded the new venture on his own. He started to build an ISP. He had no idea if anyone would ever use it. Netcom had just put in their access at about this time (Sept ’94, maybe a little earlier, who can remember exactly when) but no one knew how many people were using their service here in Monterey. Karl was only able to identify about six people for sure he knew of who were using the new Netcom POP in early October of 1994. Most people involved in online services as owners or customers expressed doubts about their interests in the Internet. At that time the Internet was just another service among many, just another pebble on the beach. No one could predict if it would truly go anywhere at that time.
During the month that followed Karl needed to come up with a name. He ran a contest on Nitelog, stating a nice prize would be given to the customer who came up with the name he chose. A large number of names were offered and Karl didn’t choose any of them although he was fond of one person’s suggestion (harborlights.com). Names such as monterey.com, mbay.com, montereybay.com, moby.com were some others that Karl remembers considering. He rejected them because he didn’t want to be tied to a geographically based name. Even then he had ambitions of spreading the company out over a larger area than Monterey alone. Karl gave away the price anyway, but cannot remember whom he gave it to or what the prize was, probably the guy who came up with harborlights.com.
Finally he decided on cybernet.com. He named the new computer cybernet.com and he even took out a business license in the name of Cybernet Communications. The next step was to register the name with the government (there was no internic then). After a month of waiting they told him the name was already taken. Oops! First lesson learned, check with the government to see if your choice is available before you start to use it. Back to the drawing board.
Always a fan of Astronomy, Karl decided he would try to come up with a name related to astrophysics. He came up with a list and ran them by his friend and confidante Ray Johns, who told Karl he’d better keep trying because his chosen names were a little left of center. Finally he decided on five choices he liked and registered all five (registration was free then). Three came back registered, the government lost his other two, which at that time wasn’t unusual. Of the three he eventually chose redshift.com because he liked the connection between Red Shift (a term used to describe an expanding universe as in “a Red Shifted universe”) and the quickly expanding universe of the Internet. Karl didn’t actually use those exact words at the time. It was Tony Cricelli who eventually coined that phrase.
He then setup an Internet based computer called axel.redshift.com (named after his newborn son, Matthew Axel) using Galacticom Internet Gateway software. After eight weeks of toiling with this setup he finally concluded that the software and most of the hardware was too limited. He scrapped the entire system, losing about seven thousand dollars – and he had just gotten started. He decided to move to using Linux (a Unix derivative) instead and built a new server as well. This proved incredibly time consuming and a slow process. Getting the T1 installed was taking forever too, so there was plenty of time to work on it.
During these months that Karl was beginning to build Red Shift, Tony Cricelli and John Clarke, who would soon become the other two principals in Red Shift, were negotiating with a Monterey local by the name of George Sidman. The pretext was that he would potentially fund an ISP in the Monterey area. After six months of fruitless meetings, negotiations broke off. John returned to work full time at a computer store in Seaside, CA and Tony returned to working full time at the Navy’s University in Monterey. For the next six months, John interned with Tony. Tony taught John how to be a Unix system administrator.
In December of 1994, Karl, realizing that he would not be able to run Red Shift alone turned to John Clarke and asked him to be the system administrator for Red Shift. John was the only other person on earth that Karl knew at that time who also knew about Linux. In fact when Karl was looking for a Unix OS to use, he considered BSD, SCO and Linux. It was John who convinced Karl to choose Linux. John worked on Red Shift in the evenings after he was done working at the computer store.
