As I sit here listening to the strains of the Who's Tommy, I reflect back on the past year with Wimsey. This has been an exciting year for us. This time last year I was shopping for a house almost every weekend, spending most of my work time looking after my computer consulting customers and only a small part of it on administering the computers that are collectively known as Wimsey. I had time to spend with my kids and wife in summer activities and other things; in short, life was pretty good.
In the middle of August we bought our new house in Pitt Meadows (no, I don't own the whole town) about 20 minutes outside of Vancouver (except at rush hour.) I spent the next 2 months working out of my new home office overlooking our back yard and watching the kids on their trampoline and in the pool. I had a full Unix system there, along with my fax, telephone system, and answering machcine. My partner Stuart Lynne and I had been experimenting with connecting various systems together with PPP (Point to Point Protocol) over dialup 14,400 modems and I had my site directly connected to his where the Wimsey computers were. This let me administer the system directly and meant I didn't have to commute - all according to plan.
Wimsey had long been a supplier of Internet connectivity to the local computer community. Almost every one of the local BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) had at one time or another fed via UUCP (Unix to Unix Command Processor or Unix to Unix CoPy) through dialup modems from our system. Some had grown to the point where they had put in direct feeds, but most still connected for E-mail and Usenet News through Wimsey. In addition, Wimsey provided a place for people who had grown up on the local university systems with free Internet access included and who were no longer eligible because they had left the accademic world, to dial in and use the Unix system interactively as they had the ones at the universities.
This let us have the benefit of a larger system than we would otherwise probably have, plus it meant that we had our own net access too. All of this was aimed at allowing us to carry on our major business, creating and selling computer software, and to flourish in the community of the Internet.
Some time in late summer '93 a book came out that was to change our lives. The book was "The Internet Starter Kit for the MacIntosh". It contained a diskette which the purchaser could install on their MAC which would set up a network connection to an Internet provider that had the corresponding hardware and software on their central system. The closest such system mentioned in the book was in Seattle, a long distance call away.
A couple of our customers suggested that it looked like our system could be easily made to act as a server for this software. We arranged to spend a day with one of them getting things right, and the rest is history. The MAC community embraced this new-found facility and we started looking around for ways to extend this to the PC/Windows crowd too.
By early December we had added more new users than we had added in the previous two years. The stampede had begun.
Our systems had been growing as we added more users and disk storage, to the point where our central system was Intel DX2/66 based with over 5 Gigabytes of on-line storeage and 32 ports for modems. In addition, I had my own similar system at home, and Stuart had a couple of lesser machines for developement and testing. Our net access link to BC Net consisted of a standard dialup line with a pair of ZyXel modems running at 19,200 baud.
The first thing we had to do was to increase the speed of our link to the outside world. We did this by replacing the dialup line with a 56K lease line via one of our customers' sites. The dialup line had been almost choked with the incoming Usenet News feeds we took to distribute to our BBS customers. This had left little bandwidth for the new SLIP and PPP customers that were coming to us in droves. The new 56K link had not only spare bandwidth, but faster response too; instead of taking several tenths of a second for a response, the typical time was now in the hundredths.
Our popularity stressed our hardware to the limit since we were running the network protocol software directly on the main computer, and we found that there was a limit to how many sessions we could support this way. The popularity also stressed our telephone line capacity too. Wimsey had to this point been working out of Stuart's basement which was beside the main phone box for a fairly large housing complex. We didn't expect to run out of spare phone lines for several years because of this.
The two problems surfaced at almost exactly the same time. We ran out of phone lines (could have had a few more for a horrible amount of 'construction' charge if we wanted to but could see this would not be enough either) and ran out of CPU capacity too. In addition, we had hired another person (Ken Cillis) to keep up with the bookkeeping and new signups, and the basement was getting crowded.
Wimsey solved all of these problems by opening an office in the industrial park called Lake City in Burnaby - next door to Port Moody where the original systems were. The new office was part of an existing office of one of our customers. They had some spare space and were glad to make a deal that would get them a higher speed link. The new office won't run out of lines for quite some time either - it used to house a bank clearing centre.
We solved the CPU power problem by purchasing both a new Pentium powered box and a pair of terminal server boxes. The Pentium was given the task of running the news feeds and the terminal servers offloaded the SLIP/PPP processing from the main computers. We also boosted our Internet feed to an ISDN 2x64K link and paralleled this to another provider for redundancy.
Along the way we added a full time technical support person (John Henders) and have now added a full time business administrator (Mac MacKenzie) to look after all of the new businesses we find ourselves in. The consulting business has expanded and consists of 4 individuals, we have a budding on-line Publishing business, and our Unix driver development business is also very busy.
The immediate future looks very promising. We will be opening lines in other places both throughout B.C. and Canada. Our publishing people are set to put up a number of new publications and facilities (not the least of which is this one.) Our system administrators are looking after a number of facilities around the net, and we are in negotiations with potential partners for our expansion efforts.
I intend to keep you informed as things progress. I hope you will understand if there are delays in getting out new materials, but this is the hazard of being part of a rapidly growing business.
Richard Pitt (richard@wimsey.com)
admin@wimsey.com