Nando (from "News and Observer") was an American internet news service and
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
(ISP), founded in 1993 by the publishers of ''
The News & Observer
''The News & Observer'' is an American regional daily newspaper that serves the greater Triangle area based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The paper is the largest in circulation in the state (second is the '' Charlotte Observer''). The paper has be ...
'' newspaper in
Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the List of North Carolina county seats, seat of Wake County, North Carolina, Wake County in the United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, second-most ...
. Initially it relied on access via
bulletin board
A bulletin board (pinboard, pin board, noticeboard, or notice board in British English) is a surface intended for the posting of public messages, for example, to advertise items wanted or for sale, announce events, or provide information. B ...
technology. One of the first 24-hour news websites, the ''Nando Times'', was launched in 1994, providing edited information from major
news agencies
A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, ...
that had not then developed their own websites.
The parent corporation was sold in 1995 to the California-based
McClatchy
The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states and ...
newspaper chain. The dial-up ISP business was closed down, and the Nando Times pages were discontinued in 2003. The editorial staff continued to process wire stories, which fed other McClatchy outlets. The Nando brand itself was abandoned in 2005 in favor of the name
McClatchy Interactive
The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states and ...
.
Inception
Nando was produced by the New Media division of ''
The News & Observer
''The News & Observer'' is an American regional daily newspaper that serves the greater Triangle area based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The paper is the largest in circulation in the state (second is the '' Charlotte Observer''). The paper has be ...
'' newspaper in
Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the List of North Carolina county seats, seat of Wake County, North Carolina, Wake County in the United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, second-most ...
. In 1993
George Schlukbier
George Schlukbier is the North American innovator who in the 1990s built Nando, one of the early websites offered by a daily newspaper (''The News & Observer'' of Raleigh, North Carolina), and NandO Times, an early and much-copied online newspaper. ...
, a news librarian from
McClatchy Newspapers
The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states and ...
, became the first New Media Director; he was hired by Frank Daniels III, editor of the daily paper, to build this new division. In this effort to prove that the Internet was a better partner for newspapers than
AOL
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017 ...
or
Prodigy
Prodigy, Prodigies or The Prodigy may refer to:
* Child prodigy, a child who produces meaningful output to the level of an adult expert performer
** Chess prodigy, a child who can beat experienced adult players at chess
Arts, entertainment, and ...
, the core developers were Dave Livingston (nicknamed "Sleepy Squirrel"), Charles Hall, James Calloway, Alfred Filler, Fraser Van Asch, "Zonker" Harris, Mike Emmett and Schlukbier. This team built a
GUI
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
to the Internet using
The Major BBS
The Major BBS (sometimes MajorBBS or MBBS) was bulletin board software (a bulletin board system server) developed between 1986 and 1999 by Galacticomm. In 1995 it was renamed Worldgroup Server and bundled with a user client interface program na ...
as a front end, extended to use traditional Internet applications such as
Gopher
Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They are ...
,
WAIS,
Lynx
A lynx is a type of wild cat.
Lynx may also refer to:
Astronomy
* Lynx (constellation)
* Lynx (Chinese astronomy)
* Lynx X-ray Observatory, a NASA-funded mission concept for a next-generation X-ray space observatory
Places Canada
* Lynx, Ontar ...
and
Telnet
Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...
. With this ad-hoc system, Nando.net provided classified news and became a commercial ISP in
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
's
Research Triangle
The Research Triangle, or simply The Triangle, are both common nicknames for a metropolitan area in the Piedmont region of North Carolina in the United States, anchored by the cities of Raleigh and Durham and the town of Chapel Hill, home to ...
area, which encompasses Raleigh,
Durham Durham most commonly refers to:
*Durham, England, a cathedral city and the county town of County Durham
*County Durham, an English county
*Durham County, North Carolina, a county in North Carolina, United States
*Durham, North Carolina, a city in No ...
,
Cary
Cary may refer to:
Places
;United States
* Cary, Illinois, part of the Chicago metropolitan area
* Cary, Indiana, part of the Indianapolis metropolitan area
* Cary, Miami County, Indiana
* Cary, Maine
* Cary, Mississippi
* Cary, North Carolina ...
and
Chapel Hill Chapel Hill or Chapelhill may refer to:
Places Antarctica
* Chapel Hill (Antarctica) Australia
*Chapel Hill, Queensland, a suburb of Brisbane
*Chapel Hill, South Australia, in the Mount Barker council area
Canada
* Chapel Hill, Ottawa, a neighbo ...
.
Technology
Networking
![nando-rack](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Nando-rack.jpg)
In 1993 networking standards were not as pervasive as they are now. The newspaper publishing tools were based on proprietary networking cards and terminals used with a
Tandem
Tandem, or in tandem, is an arrangement in which a team of machines, animals or people are lined up one behind another, all facing in the same direction.
The original use of the term in English was in ''tandem harness'', which is used for two ...
mini-computer.
AppleTalk
AppleTalk is a discontinued proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh computers. AppleTalk includes a number of features that allow local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the n ...
over
coax cable
Coaxial cable, or coax (pronounced ) is a type of electrical cable consisting of an inner conductor surrounded by a concentric conducting shield, with the two separated by a dielectric ( insulating material); many coaxial cables also have a p ...
was the way
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
es communicated.
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0.
Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3 ...
did not even have a network layer installed by default.
Into this mix came a Sun
SPARC
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...
computer. Transferring data from the Tandem to the SPARC required a common interface, and that interface was
X.25
X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet-switched data communication in wide area networks (WAN). It was originally defined by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, now ITU-T) in a series of drafts a ...
. X.25, although developed for satellite communication, was one of the few standards actually implemented by most hardware vendors.
Bulletin board technology
![nando-floppy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Nando-floppy.jpg)
Before the Web, most people accessed remote computers via
dumb terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and ...
emulator
In computing, an emulator is Computer hardware, hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run so ...
s running on their PCs.
BBS
BBS may refer to:
Ammunition
* BBs, BB gun metal bullets
* BBs, airsoft gun plastic pellets
Computing and gaming
* Bulletin board system, a computer server users dial into via dial-up or telnet; precursor to the Internet
* BIOS Boot Specificat ...
systems came in two flavors:
DOS
DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems.
DOS may also refer to:
Computing
* Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel
* Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicatio ...
based and proprietary. DOS based systems required one PC and one modem for each incoming phone line. It was not uncommon for a BBS to have a hundred IBM PCs stacked up next to shelves of a hundred modems.
The advantage of the proprietary systems (such as
Galacticomm
The Major BBS (sometimes MajorBBS or MBBS) was bulletin board software (a bulletin board system server) developed between 1986 and 1999 by Galacticomm. In 1995 it was renamed Worldgroup Server and bundled with a user client interface program n ...
) was that they used special software and hardware to handle more than one user on a single PC. The Galacticomm hardware supported up to sixteen serial cards, each with multiple RS-232 ports.
The GalactiComm software also supported the X.25 protocol, so there was a path between all the various systems, however circuitous it appears from today's perspective.
With the arrival of the World Wide Web, users no longer needed a terminal emulator (or a BBS). Instead, they now required a network layer for their Windows 3.1 PC. The Nando Help Desk answered telephone enquiries regarding "the web" (then in its infancy), and assisted new users with the process of downloading the required
TCP/IP
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...
network software via the BBS or
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
, then installing both it and a browser such as
Mosaic
A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...
.
Name
''The News & Observer'' newspaper's nickname, "The N&O," gave the site its name, presented online as NandO or Nando, apparently after the newspaper's News Library staff pointed out that the ampersand would create difficulties in database construction and so coined the title of NandO, according to Teresa Leonard, chief librarian of ''The News & Observer''. The electronic edition went far beyond the original content of the North Carolina paper, which eventually was shifted to a different Web address (at
http://newsobserver.com
) maintained by a separate staff.
'LHP' and 'CBGL'
![nando-watch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Nando-watch.jpg)
The leaders of this emerging phenomenon gave themselves imaginative titles, a bit of whimsy that set a wacky, free-flying tone for company atmosphere and morale. Frank Daniels III was LHP, for "Lord High Protector." George Schlukbier was CBGL, for "Chief Bull Goose Looney." Employees followed suit with their own job titles. As in other internet start-up companies, there was frenzied activity 24-hours a day, seven days a week. A company lore evolved, with numerous stories such as the one about installing system upgrades and dropping dial-up customers by the rack. Even the FBI were regular players. During the period when
Kevin Mitnick
Kevin David Mitnick (born August 6, 1963) is an American computer security consultant, author, and convicted hacker. He is best known for his high-profile 1995 arrest and five years in prison for various computer and communications-related crim ...
was America's most-wanted computer hacker (1994–1995) he was living in Raleigh and using cell phones to hack into ISP's and then telneting into unsuspecting UNIX servers (like Nando) and creating directories/files and deleting all traces. Nando technicians tried, but never quite managed, to get a fix on Mitnick's location. All the while, the company was in communication with the FBI. In fact, it was required to be in touch with the FBI. During this period, increasingly computer-savvy young people were starting to figure out the holes in Unix. Life was changing at Nando.
''Nando Times''
In 1994 Nando.net added a Web server and a Mosaic-compatible website front end, and the NandO Times was born — one of the first updated-around-the-clock news and sports websites. Nando invented its own model of how newspapers could handle online production, news, sales and help desks while developing new online products.
At first,
News & Observer
''The News & Observer'' is an American regional daily newspaper that serves the greater Triangle area based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The paper is the largest in circulation in the state (second is the '' Charlotte Observer''). The paper has be ...
copy desk staff (called
sub-editor
Copy editing (also known as copyediting and manuscript editing) is the process of revising written material (copy) to improve readability and fitness, as well as ensuring that text is free of grammatical and factual errors. ''The Chicago Manual of ...
s in the UK) fed stories to the Nando Times from the newspaper's main newsroom, using aging SII newswire editing terminals to add intermediate mark-up codes for further processing into HTML. Nando developers figured out how to semi-automate newswire story conversion and posting of news photos to the site, including an early
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
-powered animated photo display, although the photos were never fully integrated with related stories.
Shortly before the Daniels family sold the News & Observer company to the
McClatchy
The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states and ...
newspaper chain, Nando and the online
News & Observer
''The News & Observer'' is an American regional daily newspaper that serves the greater Triangle area based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The paper is the largest in circulation in the state (second is the '' Charlotte Observer''). The paper has be ...
became separate operations and Nando editors moved into a separate building. Seth Effron became Nando's executive editor, Zonker Harris was the managing editor, Mike Emmett, who had a long career as a writer and editor with several of the U.S.'s largest dailies, was the sports editor, while Bruce Siceloff headed the NewsObserver.com staff. Michael Carmean, who had headed the copydesk staff, departed. Other early Nando personnel included Charles S. Powell (the "Evangelist"), Beth Ames, Fraser Van Asch, Lisa Pignetti, Gene Wang, Kirk House, Ari Spanos, Alfred Filler, Denise Long, Joe Sterling, Joyce Garcia, Dawn Harris and Sam Barnes. Barnes sometimes worked from the office of the N&O-owned
Chapel Hill News
''The News & Observer'' is an American regional daily newspaper that serves the greater Triangle area based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The paper is the largest in circulation in the state (second is the ''Charlotte Observer''). The paper has bee ...
, inspiring Bob Stepno, a Nando part-timer and
University of North Carolina
The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC Sy ...
journalism doctoral student, to move his weekend morning shift there. In 2000, Schlukbier and Total Sports parted ways. Also leaving were Emmett and Harris, who both went to Miami to work for Terra.com, the world's largest Hispanic Web site. Emmett moved on to Time Warner/CNN as managing editor of NASCAR.com, then Greenville Online as assistant editor and finally, before retiring, Media General's Western Carolina Regional Manager. Harris continues to work for the Daniels family and is based in Cary, N.C.
Services Nando provided in 1994
![nandoland](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Nandoland.jpg)
*Classifieds
*International News
*National News
*Regional and Local News
*Sports
*Business
*Lifestyle
*Interactive Websites for Valentine's Day and most major holidays.
*Games, including Mutants and Hangman.
*Chats
*ISP service including the first “Nando Doctor,” Kirk House. House made "House calls" to help users set up the dial-up service.
*Help Desk
*NIE ("Newspapers In Education") programs- NandOLand, free access to the internet for schools
After the McClatchy merger, Nando New Media evolved into McClatchy New Media, with the output of the Nando newsroom channelled to the "24 Hour News" section of all McClatchy newspapers' websites.
News content
The Nando Times employed a round-the-clock crew of news editors, who reprocessed almost all of the News & Observer's incoming wire service feeds:
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
,
Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency was estab ...
,
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the world's oldest news agency.
AFP has regional headquarters in Nicosia, Montevideo, Hong Kong and Washington, D.C ...
,
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
,
Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
,
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
,
Scripps-Howard
The E. W. Scripps Company is an American broadcasting company founded in 1878 as a chain of daily newspapers by Edward Willis "E. W." Scripps and his sister, Ellen Browning Scripps. It was also formerly a media conglomerate. The company is he ...
,
Bloomberg Bloomberg may refer to:
People
* Daniel J. Bloomberg (1905–1984), audio engineer
* Georgina Bloomberg (born 1983), professional equestrian
* Michael Bloomberg (born 1942), American businessman and founder of Bloomberg L.P.; politician and ma ...
and others. This was about a year before most of those news organizations created their own Web sites, and apparently before the wire services recognized an "online edition" as something separate from the printed newspaper. AP and Nando soon became allies in developing the model of how newspapers would use wire services.
Nando editors selected stories, wrote fresh headlines and sorted the wire service stories into news category pages — National, World, Political, Sports, Business etc. Nando's editors sometimes created "combined wires" stories or rewrote story leads. The Nando Times briefly experimented with original news reporting, including sports and election coverage, but became almost exclusively an aggregator and enhancer of news from traditional news services.
Nando excelled at posting "topic" pages carrying dozens of links for developing stories, such as the April, 1995,
Oklahoma City bombing
The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on April 19, 1995. Perpetrated by two anti-government extremists, Timothy McVeigh and Terry N ...
and the death of
Diana, Princess of Wales
Diana, Princess of Wales (born Diana Frances Spencer; 1 July 1961 – 31 August 1997) was a member of the British royal family. She was the first wife of King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) and mother of Princes William and Harry. Her ac ...
. The Diana memorial pages, hundreds of headlines and pictures from Aug. 31 through Sept. 26, 1997, were among the last documents left on the Nando site in March 2005, although the linked headline stories had expired from the server.
Hot Java
Nando Times experimented with
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
programming early, creating a Java-powered rotation of news photos on its home page in 1996, linked to photo gallery pages. Behind the scenes, the most lasting demonstration of Nando Media's Java programming was its Digital Work Bench content management system. The Java-based CMS was written from the ground up starting in 1999 by the company's development team, becoming the default publishing system for the Nando Times. It was later adopted by several McClatchy properties and was eventually re-written entirely in
Perl
Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...
.
McClatchy buys Nando
The Nando "brand" became known quickly and was credited with enhancing the value of the News & Observer corporation, which the Daniels family sold in 1995 to the California-based
McClatchy
The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states and ...
newspaper chain. The News & Observer's 1995 efforts also had included a computer-assisted investigation of the North Carolina hog industry, which won it the 1996
Pulitzer Prize for Public Service
The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for journalism. It recognizes a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalis ...
.
Toward the end
After the sale, McClatchy abandoned Nando's dial-up ISP business (sold to
MindSpring
EarthLink is an American Internet service provider.
It went public on NASDAQ in January 1997. Much of the company's growth was via acquisition; by 2000, ''The New York Times'' described Earthlink as the "second largest Internet service provider ...
, now part of
EarthLink
EarthLink is an American Internet service provider.
It went public on NASDAQ in January 1997. Much of the company's growth was via acquisition; by 2000, ''The New York Times'' described Earthlink as the "second largest Internet service provider ...
) and cut back its exploration of original news coverage, which had included the 1996 election campaign.
McClatchy shifted the focus of "Nando New Media" to serve its newspapers and other clients, while Frank Daniels III and other early Nando executives left to create Internet startups focused on community news (Koz) and sports (
Total Sports).
With Nando's changing role, The News & Observer established an interactive media division in 1997, led by Mark Choate. The new division produced newsobserver.com, an online newspaper publishing local news and advertising, as a complement to the national and international news published by Nando. Under Choate's direction, newsobserver.com quickly became one of the leading local newspaper web sites in the country. By 2001, The Media Audit ranked newsobserver.com third in the nation in terms of local market penetration for online newspapers, trailing washingtonpost.com and austin360.com. In that same year, Editor & Publisher awarded newsobserver.com with an EPpy, naming it the best online newspaper service in its circulation category.
The Nando Times pages were discontinued May 27, 2003, replaced with a "Dear readers" page of explanation, with a directory of McClatchy papers' individual sites where the former Nando Times content could be found. The editorial staff continued to process wire stories, which fed the "24 hour news" sections of other McClatchy properties, such as NewsObserver and SacBee.
The Nando brand was abandoned by the
McClatchy Company
The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states and ...
on March 3, 2005 in favor of the name
McClatchy Interactive
The McClatchy Company, commonly referred to as simply McClatchy, is an American publishing company incorporated under Delaware's General Corporation Law and based in Sacramento, California. It operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states and ...
.
References
{{reflist
External links
*The McClatchy Compan
*Archived Nando pages from 1996-200
The News & Observer
American news websites
Defunct Internet service providers
Internet service providers of the United States
Internet properties established in 1993
Internet properties disestablished in 2005