July 13, 2006

By Virgil Hervey

What do peace activism, a small-town restaurant, and a nationwide Internet provider all have in common? Two things: Yellow Springs and Bruce Cornett. The Green Earth Store, The Village Greengrocer, -Carol’s Kitchen, Logical Solutions and Servlet, Inc. are all local businesses Cornett and his wife Carol have owned since they first came to the village in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until Cornett designed a software program to track inventory for his restaurant that he discovered what he really wanted to do was build his own computer networks.

This past year Cornett’s business, Servlet, an Internet service provider (ISP) in its tenth year of business, expanded from three to seven employees and more than doubled its number of servers when it purchased Siscom, an ISP in Dayton. The old Siscom is now a subsidiary of Servlet, which will officially become Servlet Internet Services Company, an Ohio corporation, sometime this week. The new company will also be referred to as SISCOM.

Started as a local ISP itself, Servlet now provides a number of services mostly geared to the business community, including Web site hosting, e-mail, e-mail filtering, application development programming, and e-commerce applications.

While he has been around town long enough that most folks probably think he was born here, Cornett was actually reared down the road in Waynesville. It was the anti-Vietnam War protests of the late ’60s and early ’70s that brought him and his wife to Yellow Springs. If you were opposed to the war, Yellow Springs was the place to be, he said in a recent interview.

Cornett’s frustration with not being able to find inventory-tracking software suitable for his various businesses led him to write his own computer program. Self-taught as a programmer, Cornett said, he took great satisfaction in building the software himself. That, in time, led him to form a partnership with former Carol’s Kitchen employee, Mike Hardy. Carol Cornett later went on to teach English to international students at Wright State.

Doing business as Logical Solutions, Cornett and Hardy developed SOHO Connection, a software router that allows multiple users to share a single Internet connection. According to Cornett, it was the first of its kind and is still being used as freeware by devotees all over the world. Hardy is now a vice president at Sun Microsystems in California, and Cornett is the CEO of a growing local business.

Much of Servlet’s current business has to do with secure interactive business Web sites. In the pre-Internet days, Cornett’s business Logical Solutions provided direct electronic transferal of billing information to insurance carriers from medical providers. Much of that and other kinds of confidential information now travel over the Internet, where security is a major concern, he said. If you are using a high-speed Internet connection from a business site, a firewall is an absolute necessity, he said. On the interactive business sites, Servlet controls who has access to what information.

As a provider of DSL, or a high speed hardwire Internet connection, Servlet has a network area, called a LATA, that ranges from just north of I-70 to Cincinnati, and just west of I-75 to central southern Ohio. Virtually anyone in that area can obtain DSL service from Servlet. While the focus is on business customers, Cornett still wants to serve individuals. He said the smaller customer has benefited from the innovations and service extras that were designed with the larger business customers in mind.

Where once Internet access service had been a minimal part of the business, Servlet now has over 2,000 access clients. The purchase of Siscom enables him to spread the load over more servers for more efficiency.

“I’m in it up to my ears,” he said.

An air-conditioned building behind his home on Xenia Avenue at the south end of the village houses dozens of servers and other kinds of electronic equipment.

Cornett calls this his studio. A cornfield looms in the large window behind his desk. Out the window to his left a bluebird could be seen hovering at a birdfeeder. The other half of his business space is now located in Siscom’s old offices at the corner of Wilkinson and Second Street in Dayton, across from the Schuster Center. His daughter Patty, now a shareholder in the business, spends most of her time there.

Cornett spends the first three hours of his day working on filtering spam from incoming e-mail.

“In the business we call this an e-cow,” he said. “It’s like the dairy farmer. He has to milk the cows in the morning and again at night, seven days a week. He can’t leave. If I’m going to live like that, where better to do it than here?” he said, pointing to the cornfield.

Cornett said that his gift to Yellow Springs will be a downtown “hot spot” of free wireless Internet service. He pointed out that the canopy of trees that nearly covers the village makes it difficult to do more than that. He has already installed equipment on the water tower, but is waiting to upgrade it before going on line. However, he cautioned villagers not to expect too much. Mostly, the wireless Internet service will only be accessible outside, or near windows. If there are too many leaves in the way, the line-of-sight signals won’t be able to penetrate, he said.

In the future Cornett will be looking to expand his high speed networks. Having originally become involved with computers in order to fix his own inventory tracking troubles, he said that solving other people’s business problems is now what Servlet is all about. His personal experience has enabled him to identify with the problems that other small businesses have.

“We had a motto at Logical Solutions,” he said. “‘Good enough isn’t.’ I guess you could say that’s still our motto.”