Demon Internet - Early Days

Early Days

Demon Internet was born of Demon Systems, a bespoke business software development company formed by Cliff Stanford, Grahame Davies and Owen Manderfield. In a discussion of the need for a home-oriented dialup IP service on the CIX boards, Stanford suggested that if 200 people stepped up with a year's subscription, he would use Demon's infrastructure to create such a service.

The original Demon service was hosted using mainly Apricot servers including a gigantic pair of LSI towers named "gate" and "post".

When Demon started, WinSock was still a new concept. Most PC users had to use "KA9Q" or "NOS" - a command line style client - to establish their TCP/IP connection to use ftp, gopher, telnet, etc. The Worldwide Web had not yet arrived.

Thanks to Demon Systems, Demon Internet always had a strong programming team allowing it to create solutions to emerging issues in-house. All three directors were programmers and Stanford wrote many business-critical pieces of software, writing modules to adapt MMDF to Demon's purposes. Mark Turner, originally one of Demon System's developers, wrote many of the accounts and operational systems. As Stanford was increasingly absorbed with corporate activities, Neil McRae eventually took over the work on the mail system. Oliver Smith moved from Systems to Internet to run and automate services for corporate customers. Later on, Peter Galbavy was brought in to develop solutions for interoperability issues and Ronald Khoo developed low-level networking solutions that allowed the company to run on free operating systems and PC-based hardware.

Many other key Demon people started out as developers - Giles Todd, Clive Feather, Richard Clayton.

Armed with so many developers, many of whom made names for themselves within the developing industry, Stanford used the company's ability to contribute its developments to the Open Source community as a means of developing Demon's reputation beyond what its actual Internet Service commanded.

Because the Internet was still a relatively new phenomenon, the domain of academics and geeks, Demon's home-dialup focus was also its Achilles heel. They had some exposure after sponsoring Fulham F.C., but British Telecom were very sceptical of Demon's projected growth and did not provide for expansion, resulting in a regular shortage of lines and regular redigs of the top end of Hendon Lane, Finchley, north London to lay down additional cables. Demon moved initially to Energis lines with a Regionally Organised Modem Pool (ROMP) and later added COLT lines to the service so they had more control over which lines new customers used over separate 0845 numbers.

Demon's early days are described in an interview with Cliff Stanford published in The Independent on 15 January, 1996.