The History of PenguinTek

PenguinTek was created in January of 2000 by Jeremy Gault, Chris Cook, Tim Mills, and John Paul Swamickannu (we just called him "J.P." for short.)  This was created as part of the Cleveland High School PC Repair/PC Networking classes (which have since been renamed/integrated into other classes.)

The original PenguinTek server was an old Pentium II server with a couple of SCSI drives.  This server resided at the school, and ran on a T1 connection donated by WingNET Internet Services.  This T1 connection served the PC Repair/PC Networking classroom and the server.  (The rest of the school still ran on a T1 provided by the state.)  Due to the fact that the PC Networking class required messing with network configurations, along with running protocols such as FTP, IRC, etc. (which were blocked by the state's filter), that classroom had to have its own separate, un-filtered connection.

This original server ran at the school from 2000 until the summer of 2002.  At that time, a dispute between several parties arose regarding the Internet connection, and we discovered that the T1 was brought down without warning.  Immediately, action was taken to move the penguintek.net domain to the admin's other server (Pointless Media Group) and to begin restoring access for all of the existing PenguinTek users.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that this was done without warning, it was not possible to back up the users' files.  All existing PenguinTek users were offered their E-Mail accounts back, along with web hosting space, provided they could re-upload their own content.  A few of the existing users were reconnected, but a lot of them had simply already abandoned their old sites.  (This was around the time when domain names became much more affordable, and so a lot of users had moved on to their own domains.)

Arrangements continued this way for several more years, until Pointless Media Group simply began operating under the PenguinTek name (hey, we're Linux folks and it's cooler.)  A couple of the original founders still use PenguinTek to this day, and we have future plans to expand it.