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| About Fat City Network Services |
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Fat City Network Services is a high technology company that primarily
focuses on Internet mailing lists, but also offers a variety of other services such as
website hosting, dynamic website design and general IS/IT consulting. As a company, we have over 15 years of
experience as a service provider, and a reputation for high quality service and
attentiveness to our customers.
Fat City was founded in 1985 and started its life as a local
San Diego Bulletin Board System (BBS). At that time, San Diego had the second largest
community of BBS's in the world -- over 1200 systems. Fat City would have merely blended into the
morass of systems had it not been for the fact that its owner, Bruce Bergman, had several
years of experience with Unix systems and had been using Usenet (the predecessor to the
network that would later be called the "Internet") to send and receive E-mail and to
read "newsgroups", or shared discussion boards, for many years.
Usenet newsgroups offered a place where people could collaborate using E-mail as the mechanism
for sending messages, and each system in the network maintained a copy of all messages sent
to all of the groups. In effect, it was a giant replicated filesystem, but redundantly
carried on every node in the network. Back then newsgroups were sparsely populated
and the content was incredibly useful (obviously, this was before spam hit the net). In 1985
there were probably only 300 or so newsgroups, compared with today's count of over 20,000
newsgroups! The vast majority of the newsgroups were technically focused, although there
were other hierarchies for social issues, recreation and just plain chit-chat.
BBS's had their own proprietary networks such as FidoNet, USANet and others. Only a few BBS's interacted with Usenet, given that
the technical knowledge needed to connect to Usenet wasn't widespread. Bruce
decided to make Fat City stand apart by offering Usenet newsgroups to his BBS members. There
were only a handful of BBS's that offered Usenet connectivity, and especially newsgroups. The
BBS software that enabled this connectivity was called Waffle, and Waffle even had a Unix variant.
In addition to Usenet news, Fat City also carried a number of electronic mailing lists.
These were slightly more specialized than the newsgroups, and numbered maybe a couple
hundred at the most. A good many of them were moderated, meaning that in order for your
message to be posted to the list, it had to be read and approved by the moderator of that
mailing list. E-mail, Usenet news and mailing lists made up the bulk of Fat City's
offerings until around 1992. Fat City BBS had several thousand members.
In the early 1990's, BBS's were on the decline. Many BBS's started offering a connection to the Internet, and
while there will still proprietary networks like FidoNet, most were also on the decline. Up
until about 1990, Internet E-mail addresses were created from "bang notation", or a specific
ordering of sites separated by exclamation points. People would generally find the shortest
route from the backbone (the major sites on the net) to their leaf node. For example, a user
at Fat City might have an address like "...ucsd!crash!fatcity!bruceb". Files called "maps"
were used to piece together a route for messages to follow, and messages were transferred from
one system to the next using this routing system and a protocol known as UUCP. Obviously as the Internet grew, things
became complicated and a new solution called the "Domain Name System" came into play. In 1993,
Bruce registered the domain name "fatcity.com" and did away with bang notation E-mail addresses.
Shortly before then, Bruce started carrying his own electronic mailing lists for friends and
the local community. The first mailing list hosted by Fat City went live in 1991. Fat City became
a participant in anti-spam organizations, and even joined the short-lived Usenet2 network
(a private, anti-spam newsgroup system) for a while.
Around 1995, BBS's were seriously threatened. The number in San Diego dwindled down to under
a hundred and they were continuing to shrink. The World Wide Web was coming into full force,
and websites were being created left and right. Bruce shifted off of his long-standing BBS
software (Waffle, then later Synchronet) and moved to WINS (Wildcat Internet Networking System) which
allowed Fat City to offer a hybrid BBS/web server type of service. This ensured that Fat City's members
could retain their original E-mail address and newsgroup and mailing list access, but also play in the new
world of websites.
The number of mailing lists hosted at Fat City grew, and so did it's popularity as a place
where high quality lists were hosted. Fat City picked up several big name customers such as
the Oracle Development Tools Users Group (ODTUG), The Chip Directory
(Chipdir) and the
Triplets Parents group (parents of triplets, quads and more). Bruce decided that the primary focus
of Fat City should be on Internet mailing lists, and closed his BBS to the public around 1997
in order to make that his priority. Each succeeding year brought more and more customers, and more mailing lists.
Currently, Fat City hosts more than 60 mailing lists for hundreds of thousands of subscribers,
and sends out an average of over 30 MILLION messages a year! Fat City continues to grow and now offers more mainstream
services such as website hosting, E-mail accounts, dynamic website development (ColdFusion, PHP, etc),
online databases (MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server,
Microsoft Access, Oracle, Postgres)
and even general consulting services.
Fat City Network Services is still a small business, but big on customer service and attention
to quality and detail. We hope you'll find a home here with the Fat City family. If you have any
questions or would like more information, please contact us at your convenience.
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In case you were wondering, the name Fat City was chosen as a tribute to a song with that name produced in
1974 by a Christian Music artist named Michael Omartian. Omartian is a singer, gifted songwriter, masterful keyboardist and consumate producer who came out with a
string of records in the 1970's before he turned to production full time. His first album, "White Horse", contained the song "Fat City". The song is a parody whose lyrics are a reminder to us that no matter how powerful
or successful we become -- even living in "Fat City" -- we would have nothing if it weren't for
God, and the friends, family and events which brought us to that point. We should always remain humble in
the face of success and be faithful and appreciative to God and to those who helped us get where we are, because without them we
would have nothing. The song reminds us that we can have all the fame and fortune in the world, but without God, we truly
have nothing. I chose that name for my company as a reminder to myself to remain humble and faithful to God.
If you're interested, much of Omartian's discography can be found here.
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