The Origin Story

Dear Internet,

For years we suffered with thin packets. Fragile packets. Weak packets. Packets that lacked a satisfying handfeel.

We asked the largest cloud companies in the world for one simple feature: thicker packets. They laughed. They told us it was impossible. They said,"packets are an abstract unit of network communication and possess no measurable thickness."

We disagreed. So we bought some Dell servers, put them in a mill of our own in Oregon, and took packet thickness into our own hands. The Packet Mill was born.

Today, we are proud to announce that they were wrong.

A Brief History

The Mills of the Pacific Northwest

Before Portland had cloud regions, coworking spaces, and seventeen different ways to order coffee, it had mills.

Lots of mills.

The Pacific Northwest had two things in considerable supply:trees and rain. Fortunately, the trees could be turned into lumber. The rain mostly remained rain.

For generations, timber and lumber mills were a major part of the economy of Oregon and the broader Pacific Northwest. Logs came out of the forests, traveled by truck, rail, and river, and arrived at mills where an impressive collection of machinery and people turned very large trees into considerably more rectangular trees.

Portland was particularly well positioned for all of this. The forests were nearby, railroads converged on the region, and the Columbia and Willamette rivers provided access to ports and markets far beyond Oregon.

The basic arrangement was remarkably similar to a network:

Resources came in. They were processed. Useful things came out. Someone kept an eye on everything.

We find this reassuring.

A Mill Was More Than a Saw

A working mill required an entire crew.

There were loggers out in the woods doing the comparatively difficult job of convincing Douglas firs that it was time for a career change.

There were rigging crews and chokermen moving logs where they needed to go.

There were truck drivers and railroad crews hauling timber into town.

At the mill, the sawyers operated the big saws and decided how a log should be cut. A good sawyer understood the timber, the equipment, and how to get the greatest useful yield from what came through the mill.

In modern terminology, this person would probably have been called aSenior Wood Optimization Engineer.

Fortunately, nobody had invented LinkedIn yet.

There were edgermen and trimmer operators, taking rough-cut lumber and bringing it down to useful dimensions.Graders inspected the finished boards.Millwrights kept the machinery running. Electricians kept the electrons where they belonged. Mechanics dealt with everything else.

And somewhere there was inevitably a person who had worked at the mill for 34 years, knew exactly what every strange noise meant, and could diagnose a failing bearing from the parking lot.

Every technical operation still has this person.

We strongly recommend listening to them.

The Mill and Portland

Timber didn't simply employ the people cutting trees.

Mills supported machinists, electricians, mechanics, longshoremen, railroad workers, truck drivers, equipment suppliers, warehouses, exporters, accountants, restaurants, taverns, hardware stores, and countless other businesses.

A board leaving an Oregon mill might eventually become part of a house in California, a warehouse in Japan, a dock somewhere along the Pacific, or a kitchen table upon which someone would eventually place a beige computer weighing approximately 46 pounds.

Portland grew alongside these industries.

The rivers weren't scenery. They were transportation infrastructure.

The forests weren't something several hours away. They were part of the regional economy.

And the mills weren't quaint rustic buildings with tastefully distressed signs selling $14 sandwiches.

They were loud, complicated industrial operations filled with belts, motors, bearings, saws, steam, grease, lumber, and people who generally knew better than to wear loose clothing near rotating equipment.

From Timber to Packets

The Packet Mill doesn't actually mill timber.

This is probably best for everyone involved.

Our raw material is considerably smaller.

Instead of logs arriving by truck, packets arrive over fiber.

Instead of a head saw, we have processors.

Instead of sorting lumber, we route traffic.

Instead of drying kilns, we have servers producing heat for entirely different and considerably less useful reasons.

And instead of stacks of finished Douglas fir waiting to leave Portland, we turn electricity, storage, memory, and compute into little pieces of the Internet.

The principle, however, feels familiar.

Take something in.

Know your machinery.

Waste as little as possible.

Keep the equipment maintained.

Make something useful.

Send it on its way.

And when something begins making a noise it didn't make yesterday, investigate immediately.

Still Milled in Oregon

The great timber economy of the Northwest has changed considerably, but its fingerprints remain everywhere around Portland: old industrial districts, rail lines, river terminals, warehouses, mill towns, logging roads, and names that make considerably more sense once you know there used to be a sawmill nearby.

The Packet Mill borrows a little of that history.

Not because we're pretending a rack of servers is a 1952 lumber mill.

It isn't.

A lumber mill had substantially better hats.

But we like the idea of a small independent operation that knows its machinery, understands its product, takes care of its customers, and makes useful things here in Oregon.

Only now the lumber is virtual.

The millwrights carry laptops.

The logs have timestamps.

And absolutely everything complains when DNS stops working.