ESCAPE.COM - PROVIDING ONLINE SERVICES SINCE 1987












	© 2000 Kazan Corporation.

ABOUT US: What is Escape? | Our History | Choose Us!

ESCAPE is an online service, originally established in 1987, that provides Internet access and a range of web hosting services for end users as well as businesses. With easy to use graphical interfaces, beginners can "surf the Internet" with ease while advanced users can enjoy the full power of their favorite UNIX shell. Businesses can achieve greater visibility on the Internet with a minimum of investment.

ESCAPE is uniquely positioned to provide you with a high level of support at an extremely competitive price.

We started in the year 1986 as a bulletin board running on a Commodore 64 computer; one disk drive and a 1200 baud modem. This BBS offered message base (conversation area) access, file transfers, and of course chat access with the sysop during certain hours. It was run as a hobby; there was no charge for its use. Donations helped it grow.

The BBS ran on a part-time basis when it first opened, on a telephone line that was a voice/home phone number during the day. On an average night, the BBS would receive 10 to 15 calls.

The BBS grew rapidly, and a full time line was needed. After three months of being online, a dedicated single line was installed. Another disk drive was installed for additional files, software and the active message base storage. All files were contributed by callers for other users to download and enjoy.

The BBS kept growing. It was upgraded to a 2400 baud modem and a total of five disk drives for the message bases, email and file areas. It received an average of 30 calls per day. Eventually a few disk drives were sold, and a $1,200 40 meg hard drive was purchased. This hard drive would have been considered quite large since most files were just a few kilobytes. The 40-megabyte drive would be equivalent to today's 10-gigabyte drives. Nothing was ever erased from it, and it was never filled to the rim. There were thousands of messages and files on the BBS. The number of calls per day averaged out to 40 to 50. There were about 350-450 regular users.

The bulletin board eventually was upgraded to a 386/dx33 with 4 megs of ram, 800 megabytes of hard drive space, and 2 14,400 hst baud nodes in 1990/91. Although many of the old C-64 users were lost and upset, there was little that could have been done.

It quickly became popular for Amiga and Dos/Windows computer users. It ran on two lines, and received about 70-80 calls per day. We needed an additional line (node), but the 386 was not capable of handling it. Therefore, we upgraded to an Amiga 2000 with 4 megs of ram. It handled the 3 nodes wonderfully. The board (BBS) received an average of 100 calls per day, and again needed additional lines.

It eventually had 5 14,400 baud nodes, about 200 callers per day and nearly 600 active users. Users were removed after being inactive for 30 days, so many more than 600 had passed through.

Towards the end of 1993, this BBS was taken down and Escape, the Internet access provider as we now know it, was getting ready to go online. It took a few months for the operator to become familiar with the new equipment, configure it, get a the programs and tools set up, program, and plan the opening.

Escape acquired its Internet connectivity in February of 1994 and began accepting subscribers in March. News of Escape was spread by word of mouth, and since the phone number remained the same from the beginning days, many of the former BBS callers signed up.

The service started out with 2 Unix Sun Sparc stations, 30 28.8 modems, and a 56kb digital high-speed connection to the Internet. There were only a few Internet providers in New York City; one could barely count them on one hand.

Daily, we receive several thousand calls on our modem pool, close to 2 million connections to all of the web servers we are hosting, and many gigabytes transfers to and from the Internet per day. We have about 200 modem nodes (lines), six high-speed Unix servers, and a full T1 (1.54 megabits) connection to the Internet.
- 02/01/1995 to continue.....

Update (continuation 05/01/99):

Several years have past since we have last updated our company history. Needless to say, many new and exciting developments have occurred since. The following is a brief overview of the ever evolving expansion of Escape...

In the not too recent past we have invested many monies in order to better our services and technology to our many (and diverse) customers. We are currently connected to the Internet with redundant OC12 connections. We have thousands of dialup modems in N.Y.C. and now in over than 750 cities (and growing) in both the United States and Canada. We have added dozens of high speed servers to handle the enormous growth of our client pool for our web hosting, colocation and dedicated server services. We also added supplementary Sales and Technical support agents to handle our large call volume. We have worked around the clock for years to provide you, our customer, our priority, with the best Internet experience you can possibly receive!

Why choose us? The answer is quite simple: we are experienced. We have seen the past, the present, and now the future of the Internet. Many providers are proud to say that they have been in the industry since '94,'95, and so on. We have been providing the most reliable online services since 1987! Our business principle is customer focused, insuring that you will be provided with the best services available. Escape with us and know that you'll be in good hands!