The IP Podcast

The IP Podcast — short for The Internet Pioneers Podcast — is an oral-history podcast about the unsung engineers, sysadmins, product managers, and operators who actually built the Internet in the 1990s. Most of them are people you have never heard of. That is the point. Every episode is a long-form, first-person conversation with someone who was there doing the hands-on work — the people who leased the T1s, stood up the modem banks, argued with the telco, and kept the NOC running at 3 a.m. It is the infrastructure story underneath the story everyone already knows: not the web companies and the apps, but the layer that actually put the net into people's houses.

The show treats this as a primary-source archive. The guest's account is the material; the host frames and contextualizes but never retells the story in their place. Dates, company histories, and technical details are checked, and corrections are made publicly when the record is wrong. The goal is a record that a working network engineer can trust and that a listener who lived through the era can recognize as true.

This is also a closing-window project. The people who built the 90s Internet are aging, and some are already gone. The IP Podcast records their untold stories while they can still tell them themselves — the founders of the regional ISPs that folded in 1998 as much as the names that survived, the night-shift operators as much as the executives, the sysadmins and tinkerers whose names never made a book. Read more about the project and the team on the About page.

Episode format. Each episode is one long-form interview, roughly 45 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely with a single guest — most of the time, someone you have never heard of. No panel, no highlight reel, no scripted narration over the guest's voice — the conversation is the episode. The host prepares and asks the questions; the guest tells the story. You will hear the technical decisions, the business pressures, the telco fights, the failures, and what the work actually felt like at 2 a.m. in a closet full of hot modems.

Cadence. New episodes land weekly. Seasons are organized into arcs — for example, "Dial-Up Origins" (the first commercial ISPs), "The Broadband Transition" (from dial-up to DSL and cable), and "The Dot-Com Era and What Came After." Arcs are labeled on the episode page so you can follow a thread or jump in anywhere.

For every episode. Each episode ships with a full transcript, timestamped show notes linking to the companies, protocols, documents, and archival materials mentioned, and a short guest bio. The transcript and show notes are part of the product, not an afterthought — they make the episode a reference you can return to.

Where to start. Subscribe to the mailing list to be notified when Episode 001 goes live.

Listen on.

The IP Podcast is an independent oral-history project. If you are a company that serves this audience — an infrastructure vendor, a hosting provider, a networking hardware company, a telecom employer, or a tech-history publisher — we would like to talk to you about sponsorship. One sponsor per episode, host-read, relevant to the audience. No programmatic ads, no surveillance-tech vendors.

If you have a story to tell — you ran an ISP, a NOC, a modem bank in the 90s, or you know someone who did — we want to hear from you. You don't need to be famous. You need to have been there.