I Rebuilt PowerNet Online: The Hometown Internet I Started at 17

Some people keep a shoebox of old photos. I apparently rebuild the whole website.

Almost thirty years ago, back in 1996, I started an internet company. I was seventeen, still in high school, selling dial‑up accounts from home. My dad, Tim, came on as co‑owner, and in the spring of 1997, right around my graduation, we opened a little office at 304 Appleton Street in Menasha and set about putting the Fox Valley online, one screeching dial‑up modem at a time. We called it PowerNet Online.

It was the era when “getting on the Internet” meant a CD‑ROM, a phone line you couldn’t use while you surfed, and a local number to dial. We grew from reselling dial‑up into a real little ISP: 56K and ISDN, dedicated T1 lines for businesses, web and domain hosting, e‑mail, and, because somebody had to, computer repair. At our peak we had around 1,500 Fox Valley families and businesses online. We were even, briefly and proudly, the “Official ISP of the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers.”

What I remember most isn’t the technology, though. It’s that we genuinely were the ol’ fashioned corner store the local paper once called us. Where the national giants treated you like a credit‑card number, we’d fix your sick computer the same day and walk you through your modem settings over the phone. My dad brought the itch to run his own business; I brought a lot of my college tuition money and a teenager’s nerve.

In 2000, PowerNet merged with DigiCorporation, and I stayed on there as a part owner for about two and a half years. The dial‑up business slowly wound down through the late 2000s as the whole world moved to broadband. I’d moved on by the end, so I honestly can’t tell you the exact day the last modem went quiet. Like a lot of small ISPs, it didn’t end on one tidy date: it just faded.

And then it was gone. The domains lapsed, the pages went dark, and that was that, until I went looking on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and found the old site still sitting there, frame by frame. So I rebuilt it. Not a screenshot, a working tribute you can actually click around in:

• 🕐 A “time machine” of recreated home pages: the 1998, 2000 and 2001 versions, period‑accurate down to the tables and the blink tag.
• 📄 Scanned brochures and rate cards from the office.
• 🎨 The logo evolution, including “Sparky,” our hand‑drawn lightning‑bolt mascot, recovered from a print piece and back online for the first time ever.
• 🖥️ A photo tour of the server room that put a town on the Internet.
• 📷 A brand‑new gallery of early photos from 1997–99 at 304 Appleton Street: the first wall of modems, my dad at the next desk, and the company’s star‑spangled parade truck.

👉 Come poke around: jamiedolan.com/uspower.net

It’s a small, very 1990s story about a father, his teenage kid, and getting a town online. I’m glad it’s not lost.

This is part of Nostalgia, my collection of the old things I have built, lost, and rebuilt.