About

The 90s was a fantastic time for everything network, computer and internet related. Every 6 months your computer would be outdated, a next generation of modems would be better and faster and life was great on IRC, MUDs, ICQ and the just launched ad-and-tracker-free World Wide Web. Especially considering we came from UUCP, gopher and Veronica. It was an exciting time with innovation going at crazy rates. Yes I am nostalgic!

As a former network and systems engineer I have a soft spot for technology from this period in time. The 42718.net ISPlab was born from that fascination with 1990s Internet infrastructure, recreating the technology stack of small dial-up ISPs: SGI servers, Cisco routers, Livingston Portmasters, and Sun systems running Solaris. And yes, I think IT was much more interesting compared to today.

This site started off as a side project to create a persistent memory of the challenges I am solving along the way. I'm far from a guru on any of this and am figuring out how to fix things along the way, in many cases more than once. I hope that if you've come here it is because you're looking for an answer that I already solved - and cared to document!

Other than that - I like to preserve authentic UNIX-era connectivity experiences, because they were painful and also a lot of fun. Over time it has grown into a working showcase for early Internet hardware, which in hindsight was pretty awesome, and which is the foundation of what we all rely on on a day to day basis.

This site

Written in Markdown, edited with vi (and a little bit of CosmoCreate) on IRIX, and turned into plain HTML by a small shell-and-awk build script that I vibecoded with Claude. No database, no frameworks, nothing that should not still work in twenty years when you're scraping the wayback machine for that howto.