The World is an

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

originally headquartered in Brookline,

Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...

. It was the first commercial ISP in the world that provided a direct connection to the internet, with its first customer logging on in November 1989.

Controversy

Many government and university installations blocked, threatened to block, or attempted to shut-down The World's Internet connection until Software Tool & Die was eventually granted permission by the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

to provide public Internet access on "an experimental basis."

Domain name history

The World is operated by Software Tool & Die. The site and services were initially hosted solely under the

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

world.std.com which continues to function to this day. Sometime in or before 1994, the domain name world.com had been purchased by Software Tool & Die and used as The World's primary domain name. In 2000, STD let go ownership of world.com and is no longer associated with it. In 1999, STD obtained the domain name theworld.com, promoting the PascalCase version TheWorld.com as the primary domain name of The World.

Services

The World still offers text-based dial-up and PPP dial-up, with over 9000 telephone access numbers throughout Canada, the United States, and Puerto Rico. Other features include shell access, with many historically standard shell features and utilities still offered. Additional user services include

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

feed, personal web space, mailing lists, and email aliases. As of 2012, there were approximately 1750 active users. More recent features include domain name hosting and complete website hosting.

Community

The World offers a community

hierarchy, wstd.*, which is accessible only to users of The World. There are over 60 newsgroups in this hierarchy. The World users may send each other Memos (password protected messaging) and access a list of all personal customer websites. Much of The World's website and associated functionality was designed and built by James "Kibo" Parry.

Notable sites at The World

The Barry Shein Home PageBrookline PaxGeneral Theory of Religion
(archive)
The World's Index of Customers' Home Pages

References

External links

Official The World website

— ''on the beginning of The World, by Spike Ilacqua''.

* ttp://tv.slashdot.org/video/?embed=MxOG9mbzozCj7XMGPA1PW-hky3xVMHmF 2014 Slashdot interview: "Barry Shein Started the First Dialup ISP" {{DEFAULTSORT:World, The Internet service providers of the United States Pre–World Wide Web online services Communications in Massachusetts Companies based in Massachusetts Brookline, Massachusetts Telecommunications companies established in 1989 1989 establishments in Massachusetts Gopher (protocol) History of the Internet Internet forums Shell account providers Internet properties established in 1989