"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."
"Mason also pointed out that in the innocent early years of the internet, netizens enjoyed sharing prank emails. One day, he received such a message about "Internet Cleaning Day" which explained that in a few days, at midnight, the entire Internet would be shut down and scrubbed clean for six hours. "During that window, lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes, leaky pipes would be mended, etc," Mason explained to On Call."
In the mid-1990s a Unix administrator named Mason supported a newspaper that launched a dialup ISP as a separate department. The ISP maintained its own help desk and server admins, but Mason's Unix servers handled critical services such as dialup authentication and DNS, requiring occasional intervention. Early internet users frequently circulated prank emails, and Mason forwarded one claiming an upcoming "Internet Cleaning Day" outage. The ISP help desk manager accepted the prank as real and began preparing customer notifications. Mason discovered the outgoing notice after lunch and chose to call the help desk manager to explain the message before customers were informed.
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