Re: Portal remailer shutting down

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 7:03 PM 9/24/96, Hal wrote:
>The ISP which I have used for over five years, portal.com, is going
>out of business at the end of this month (September, 1996).  This means
>that my remailer at hfinney@shell.portal.com will cease operations.
>I had asked that it be removed from the remailer lists a few weeks ago
>due to some problems, so hopefully not many people have been using it
>lately.  But now it will go away for good.
>
>This remailer has been in operation since the fall of 1991.  I believe it
                                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^
You obviously mean "fall of 1992."

Anyway, congratulations on all of your work back then (in 1992 :-)), and
for running it for so long.

I, too, was a Portalite, from 1988-1992 (when I switched to Netcom, which
offered a local POP (point of presence) in Santa Cruz). Portal was the
first major ISP to offer accounts to non-academic users. They were also
heavily used by those who'd signed up with "PC-Pursuit," a flat-rate phone
service which made it feasible to dial-in to Portal from anywhere in the
country. When the plug was pulled on PC-Pursuit, circa mid-89, the
prospects for Portal dimmed as well. (My own usage dropped dramatically
when PC-Pursuit was canned, as dialing-in to Portal directly was costing me
$6-10 an hour, depending on the time of day. Once I got on with Netcom, in
1992, I was able to join various mailing lists, including the Extropians
list and of course  the Cypherpunks list.)

I haven't been following the fortunes of Portal for a couple of years, but
its relative absence from the playing field of Netcom, Best, Earthlink,
etc. has been pretty noticeable. So I can't say I'm surprised it's going
away.

--Tim May

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
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