RIP Cliff Stanford

I was taken aback by the news of the passing last week of Cliff Stanford. Back in the early 1990s I’d just gotten online through the Compulink Information eXchange (Cix) here the UK, which was were the seeds that became Demon Internet were planted, appropriately enough in a forum called ‘tenner-a-month’ as I recall.

I was one of those who first joined the service, even though I still had a BBC Master 128 at the time. Cliff Stanford actually phoned me up trying to flog me a PC, as they weren’t sure they’d be able to support people otherwise. (I eventually bought one locally, which is a story for another time.)

While I eventually moved on to other pastures in the late 1990s — UK Online, brief stints on CompuServe and AOL, and finally our first broadband in 2002 — I still have fond memories of my time accessing the Internet through Demon, though I was very glad to move on from the KA9Q software stack once Windows 95 came out.