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Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Most internet service providers are gone. Sonic has survived - and thrived

There was a teenager cursing on the internet. That wouldn’t be unusual, except it was 1993.

Dane Jasper and Scott Doty were students at Santa Rosa Junior College, and one of their jobs was setting up dial-up internet service at the college. In the early 1990s, internet access was becoming available on college campuses, but not everyone had it at home.

That’s when they got a call about Max posting profanity using his college account — and that’s what led them down the path of starting Sonoma Interconnect, now known as Sonic, the largest independent internet service provider in Northern California.

Jasper and Doty couldn’t find a student by that name when they looked him up. The student ID number on the account belonged to a 78-year-old woman named Mildred — someone who seemed unlikely to be spending her time using foul language online.

The pair eventually figured out the scheme. Students working in registration were stealing the student ID numbers of older adults signing up for noncomputer classes — the credentials needed to get online — and selling them to high schoolers eager to get on the internet.

“I said, ‘Scott, people are stealing this from us. We should set up a private service that provides access to the internet,’” Jasper said.

But where would they get the money to start Sonic? Doty had an answer: He opened up a drawer with paychecks from his campus job and remarked that payroll had been asking him to cash them.

The very notion of internet service providers and dial-up may seem like a legacy of the 1990s, which makes Sonic’s survival and growth all the more remarkable. The internet company marked its 25th anniversary Friday — a quarter-century after Jasper and Doty registered the domain Sonic.net.

What started in the back room of Jasper’s mother’s house has grown to 500 employees serving more than 100,000 customers in California.

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