Demon Internet

Demon Internet is a British Internet Service Provider. It was one of the UK's earliest ISPs, especially targeting the "dialup" audience. It started on 1 June 1992 from an idea posted on CIX by Cliff Stanford of Demon Systems Ltd. The branch in the Netherlands started in 1996, and was sold to KPN in June 2006, its operations being taken over by their XS4ALL subsidiary. The business was financed early on by Internet pioneer David Tabizel of Durlacher and received substantial backing from Apax Partners.

In the early days MS-DOS users were expected to download Internet connection software based on the KA9Q implementation of TCP/IP. Other platforms able to connect to the service included OS/2 Warp, Amiga, Archimedes, Atari, Linux and Mac. In 1995 the company acquired Chris Hall and Richard Clayton's Turnpike suite for Windows.

Its first service was the "standard dial-up" (SDU) - full TCP/IP access on a static IP address allowing users to receive SMTP mail and other IP traffic direct to their computers. It was possible to operate independently of Demon or to make use of Demon's mail, news, IRC, servers.

Demon was the first ISP to pioneer SDU service priced at £10 a month plus VAT, described in the sales literature as a "tenner a month". The low price attracted enough new customers that it was profitable and served to expand Internet usage in the UK. Demon still offers SDU service at the same price today but many customers today use ADSL ("broadband").

Demon Internet received a healthy boost in user numbers when "" written by pioneering internet writer Sue Schofield, negotiated with Demon in 1993/1994 to include a discount coupon in the book for newcomers to Demon. The book needed a change to Demon's mail systems. Schofield demanded and got a POP3 mail option added to the Demon service. The book sold 15,000 copies off the first print run, many readers subscribing to Demon.

In 1998 Demon was bought by Scottish Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of the private utility company Scottish Power. Scottish Telecom rebranded as Thus plc in October 1999 and floated on the London Stock Exchange. Thus plc fully demerged from Scottish Power in 2002. After the sale of Demon Internet to Scottish Telecom Cliff Stanford founded the company Redbus Investments.

The public telephone number of the company, and many of the dialup access numbers, end with 666 (the supposed Number of the Beast), a deliberate pun on the name Demon. When Thus plc was formed as a parent of Demon, its randomly allocated company number also ended in 666. Also, after a spate of "access" related names (e.g. gate, post) many of its original servers' hostnames started with dis, being the initial letters of Demon Internet Services as well as the name of a part of Hell in Dante's Inferno and another name for Lucifer.