About InetUK

Paola Kathuria, August 2002

This is the about page that was on the InetUK web site until it was closed down. I have copied it here in case anyone's interested in reading about the UK's first online directory of Internet companies.

What

InetUK, 1999

InetUK (pronounced eye-net-you-kay), the UK & Irish Internet Company Directory, contains details of any company which provides Internet-related services in UK or Ireland.

Examples of relevant services are Internet access (dial-up, ISDN, leased line), web site design and hosting, domain name registration, Internet consultancy, online promotion, and related services such as copy-writing, scanning, and graphic design. Companies on the list have offices in the UK or Ireland.

Internet access is distinguished from other related services, although some companies offer one or both, and so are listed on one or both of the lists.

Companies get listed in InetUK either because:

they submit an entry,
I read about a company in the press or magazine or, more recently,
they're listed search engine and have a web site.

When

InetUK, 1998

InetUK (short for Internet UK) started off as a periodical posting, a Usenet posting which was updated and posted to one a newsgroup on a regular basis. It contained information on companies providing Internet access in the UK.

Because the posting answered a frequently-asked question on the newsgroup [off-site] news:uk.net, it became the newsgroup's FAQ. If you're interested in knowing what an FAQ is, a good place to start is the FAQs about FAQs.

The first list of Internet access providers in the UK was started by Craig Cockburn in June 1992 and was posted to Usenet.
A free-form version was started by Sunil Gupta in December 1992.
The long list was taken over by Paola Kathuria in June 1993.
The consultancy and training lists were started in December 1994.
The consultancy and training lists were merged in April 1995.
The long and summary access lists were merged in May 1996.
The list of free access providers was started in April 1999.

Since June 1998, InetUK is only available on the web. The list was last posted to Usenet in February 1996. It is no longer available by the majordomo mailing list archive, by FTP or as downloadable compressed or text files.

Why

InetUK, 1997

I maintain InetUK in my spare time as a free service - that is, companies are not charged to get a listing on the directory and the list is not sold.

The directory is not in the public domain; compilation copyright was passed to ArcGlade Services Ltd, following several copyright infringements and subsequent legal fees.

The list is impartial in that it includes any company in the UK which provides any Internet services, no matter how competent, or not, they may appear to be in my dealings with them.

How

InetUK, 1996

The UK Internet Access list started off with 12 companies in 1992. There are now over 600 companies providing Internet services in the UK and that number is growing at an extraordinary rate.

The list started off as a free-form text entry and, after taking over the postings, I came across PDIAL, a list of publicly-accessible dial-up sites in the US; I adjusted the format to suit the UK market and started the Summary Access list in 1993. In those days, many of the people were providing dial-up access on the back of existing BBSs, and PDIAL reflects this.

InetUK was originally maintained by hand but I soon added the information to a database (the 4GL Omnis 3, running on a PC) and pasted information from my mailbox into the database. The application could generate lists as Usenet postings with the appropriate headers, as single files for putting on the ftp archives, as multi-part messages for people on the mailing list and then, later, notifications of updates for the people on the mailing list and, finally, web pages.

Up until October 1995, I was sending monthly reminders to companies to update their entries and to invite new companies to submit an entry. I did this by e-mailing companies their current entry and asking them to send it back, edited . This eventually became too time-consuming and so, from late 1996, after an announcement, I left it to companies to send me updates on an ad hoc basis. Unfortunately, this hasn't worked too well and entries have rarely been updated.

I concentrated on this web-site, whilst still making the lists available by ftp and mail and so have rewritten the page-generation code several times and am continually improving on it. You can tell which pages are created and updated by hand and which are generated by looking at the page footer for next to the page's URL ("updated" vs "generated").