Lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes …

On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register’s Friday reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Mason” who told us that in the mid-1990s he worked as a Unix administrator for a daily newspaper which decided to start a new business as a dialup internet service provider (ISP).

The ISP was set up as a separate department with its own help desk and server administrators, but Mason was sometimes called in to help because the Unix boxes he managed handled jobs like dialup authentication and DNS.

“I’m not sure what minimal hiring criteria the ISP department applied, because our group was frequently annoyed with spillover problems from their incompetence,” he told On Call.

Mason also pointed out that in the innocent early years of the internet, netizens enjoyed sharing prank emails.

One day ...