Demon Internet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Demon Internet is a British Internet Service Provider. It was one of the earliest ISPs, starting on 1 June 1992 from an idea posted on CIX by Cliff Stanford of Demon Systems Ltd. The branch in the Netherlands started in 1996, and was sold to Royal KPN in June 2006. In the early days users were expected to connect to a BBS and download basic internet connection software based on the KA9Q implementation of TCP/IP. In 1995 the company acquired Chris Hall and Richard Clayton's Turnpike suite for Windows.
Its first service was dialup IP, combined with access to mail and news servers. This was priced at £10 a month (£11.75 including VAT), or as it was described in the sales literature, a "tenner a month". They still offer this service at the same price today, but more customers today use the surftime and ADSL packages.
In 1998 it was bought by Scottish Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of the privatized utility Scottish Power. Scottish Telecom rebranded as Thus plc in October 1999, and floated on the London Stock Exchange. Thus plc fully demerged from Scottish Power in 2002. On the sale of Demon Internet to Scottish Telecom, Cliff Stanford founded the company Redbus.
Demon provides free internet access for Wireless Leiden, a wireless community network, in order to gain experience in this area.
The public telephone number of the company, and many of the dialup access numbers, end with 666 (the supposed Number of the Beast), a deliberate pun on the name Demon. Also, many of its original servers' hostnames started with dis, being the initial letters of Demon Internet Services as well as the name of a part of Hell in Dante's Inferno and another name for Lucifer.
