Could You Have Run a 1990s Internet Provider? I Built a Game So You Can Try

Not long ago I wrote about rebuilding the website of PowerNet Online, the dial‑up Internet company I started back in 1996, when I was seventeen. The thing people kept asking me afterward wasn’t about the old web pages, though. It was always the same question: what was it actually like to run the servers?

So I built a way to find out, and it grew into something bigger than I planned. There’s now a whole rack of PowerNet’s machines you can run right in your browser, each one a little simulator of the real thing, all wired together the way they actually were.

It’s 1998. You just got handed the keys to the server room.

The heart of it is PowerNet Boot Camp. It drops you at the command line of our main server: a fake (but pretty convincing) Unix terminal, green‑on‑black CRT glow and all. You’re the night‑shift admin, the phone is ringing, and there’s a help‑desk queue of twelve real problems waiting. You open the actual configuration files in pico (the friendly little editor we really used), make your edits, and run the test command. The game tells you whether you fixed it… or whether you just took the whole town offline.

Because that part was real, too. Leave one bracket out of the web server’s config and every website on the machine goes dark, not just the one you were working on. Boot Camp will cheerfully let you do exactly that, and then explain what went wrong. The tickets are all genuine jobs a small ISP did constantly: setting up a customer’s account, web hosting, a dial‑up login, becoming the DNS for a domain, compiling a newer mail server from source to plug a spam hole, standing up an anonymous FTP archive, mirroring the boot disk so a dead drive couldn’t kill the company, and turning on FrontPage publishing for a customer who built their site in, well, FrontPage.

The whole rack, one machine at a time

An ISP was never one computer. It was a rack of them, each doing one job, and I ended up building a playable console for each box PowerNet ran:

• The Solaris server: web, mail, DNS, RADIUS and FTP on one box. (That’s the Boot Camp machine.)
• The Cisco 3640: the edge router, configured in Cisco’s IOS command line, T1 and all.
• The U.S. Robotics Total Control chassis: the wall of 48 modems that actually answered the phone calls.
• The Livingston PortMaster: the first router we ran, from the company that invented RADIUS.
• The Cisco PIX firewall: added as the network grew up, guarding the server room.
• The Cobalt RaQ: the little blue hosting appliance, which you set up from a tiny LCD on the front before you ever reach a shell.
• Wally: yes, our Usenet news server really did run on an old Windows NT box named Wally.

Every one of those is its own simulator, with its own real commands and its own way to get it wrong. They’re all 100% in your browser: no network, no files, nothing you can actually break, so go ahead and try things. It works on a phone, too.

See how it all fit together

If you want the big picture before you dive into any one box, I drew it out: the PowerNet Network Map shows the whole signal path: from a 56k modem in someone’s spare bedroom, through the modem chassis, the routers and the firewall, out the T1 to the Internet, with the servers humming on the LAN behind it. And every box on the map is clickable: tap one and you drop straight into running it.

⚡ Start with the Network Map »   or   jump straight into Boot Camp »

For the truly curious: Geek Mode

If you’d rather just read how a 1990s ISP was wired together, I also wrote up Geek Mode: the real, annotated configuration for every service, one at a time, each with the gotcha that used to ruin your afternoon. (Yes, our Usenet news server really did run on an old Windows NT box named Wally.) It’s the reference behind the game.

Why I made it

Partly nostalgia, I’ll admit. But mostly it’s a small tribute to an era, and to the people who ran it: the local outfits where your Internet came from someone down the street who’d actually answer the phone. Running one of those wasn’t one big magic program; it was a dozen little machines, each doing a single job, watched over by one or two people who knew where every config file lived. For a few years, alongside my dad, that was me. Now you can try it for an evening, and see if you could have run a 1990s ISP yourself.

👉 The whole tribute lives at jamiedolan.com/uspower.net, and the rack is one click in.