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Revision as of 21:51, 3 October 2009
Erol's refers to two companies, both founded by Erol Onaran, a Turkish immigrant to Virginia.
Erol's, Inc. was a video rental and electronic sales and repair company founded in the early 1980s. It was sold to Blockbuster Video for roughly $30 million. Its success was wide-spread enough to spawn imitations. In Bolivia, there are several video rental stores called Errol's (with 2 R's) using the same font and red text on a yellow background for their logo.
Using the money from the sale of the video company, Erol would then expand his TV repair company and began selling and repairing computers. Soon afterwards, he created an ISP bearing his name in the mid 1990s, called Erol's Internet. The ISP was based in Northern Virginia, at the long time Erol's headquarters at 7921 Woodruff Ct in Springfield, VA, and was the Washington, DC, area's main competitor to AOL and smaller ISPs such as ClarkNet and CAIS. While owned by Erol Onaran, the business was run by his son, Orhan Onaran. Services provided by Erol's Internet were basic dial up access with email accounts and web space. Initially, Unix shell accounts were also provided. Unlike AOL, Erol's did not provide subscriber content, though limited attempts at this were made in later years. Erol's popularity was due to its locally based customer support, as well as cheaper prices. At one point a 5 year contract for dial up access could be purchased for just over $300, bringing the monthly cost well below $19.95, which was the average price for all other competitors.
While mostly focused on residential customers, a unit called the Business Services Group (BSG) was set up to provide business services, such as custom domain names with web sites and email, RealAudio, dedicated servers, and static IPs or network blocks. Among the more famous customers was Reba McEntire, who's reba.com web site was first hosted at Erol's. BSG was phased out after less than 2 years, although business services were available for several years longer.
In the late 1990s, Erol's sought to become a publicly traded corporation and began the process towards an IPO. Instead, the Internet portion of the company, was sold to RCN . It was rebranded Erols Internet (note the lack of the apostrophe). Slowly, over time, the Erols brand was reduced in favor of the Starpower and later RCN brand, although the domain name still resolves to RCN servers.
The Onaran family retained a small store in the nearby Ravensworth shopping center under the name Erol's Computer which sold computer parts, repaired computers and video equipment. It expanded later to include a modest selection of DVD rentals. It was located where one of their old video rental stores used to be, which was taken over by Blockbuster Video, which was then converted back into an Erol's store. Later, the store moved down the street, near it's old ISP headquarters, to a converted storage unit at 5232 Port Royal Rd, Springfield, VA, where it operated as Erol's TV-VCR & Computer Service. Around 2007, the store had reportedly gone out of business (unconfirmed), with no more Erol's presence known in the area after 20 years.
External links
References
- Errol's Video in La Paz http://www.murple.net/gallery/v/where/bolivia/lapaz/errols.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1
- "Company News; RCN To Buy Ultranet and Erol's Internet" New York Times, 22 Jan 1998 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900EEDC163BF931A15752C0A96E958260
