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Comment by lysace | Hacker News Reader

So I was just reading through a 1988 Swedish popular book on "data communications". Not a single word on Arpanet/etc. Many other network technologies and attempts at global networks described.

My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places.

Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"

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The inter-networking part of Internet was specialist knowledge restricted to those researchers actively working in the space. But countries had rich national networks back then, e.g. UK universities had a thing called JANET (joint academic network) that allowed, say, someone at the University of Kent to send files to someone at the University of Durham. The hosts were heterogeneous but the protocols were kinda sorta in place (there was a lot of X.25 leased lines and UUCP dialup, if I recall). Kent sticks in my memory because they could do commercial email in the old path!to!destination style if you knew the right guy to call. And Durham because they had this incredibly wacky mainframe OS, Michigan Terminal System, which I have never seen anywhere except there and at Newcastle (a town 40km up the road from Durham).

Any idea when JAnet connected to the Internet? When I first used it ~1994 I remember they had a single 2Mbps connection to the USA for the whole of JAnet.

What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?

UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet when I joined in 1985, and provided a relay service between the two for email and for telnet. Maybe others - not sure. Relaying email required translating the address order as the UK used big-endian "foo@uk.ac.ucl.cs" and the rest of the world used little-endian "foo@cs.ucl.ac.uk". There were a whole set of heuristics to figure out which order the destination should be, which worked fine up until Czechoslovakia joined with their .cs domain. I think it was probably in the early 90s when JAnet fully deployed IP-over-X.25, and all UK universities became IP-reachable, but some would have been reachable before then.

Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and stickers for travelling abroad).

> UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet when I joined in 1985

Same for Royal Holloway out in Egham when I went up, also in 1985.

I was foo@vaxa.rhbnc.ac.uk or uk!ac!rhbnc!vaxa@foo (or something like that).

There was an FTP relay as well.

I have fond memories of the Nordic university network (NORDUnet) when the US<-->Sweden link was upgraded to 34Mbps in '95 (NORDUnet kept 24Mbps of the cable initially). At the time the fastest connection between the US and elsewhere in Europe was 6Mbps, according to the NORDunet 25 year report....

At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over, and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the traffic from the Nordic countries...

It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in 94/95, for example.

I've never heard of NORDUnet - but googling it seems to be the international facing part of the more (in Sweden at least) famous SUNET!

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunet

https://internetmuseum.se/tidslinjen/nordunet-connects-the-n...

Well, not just SUNET. It includes SUNET (Sweden), UNINETT (Norway), FUNET (Finland), Forskingsnettet (Denmark) and RHnet (Iceland), and was how the Nordic networks arranged internet access - before NORDUnet only Norway had internet/Arpanet access (largely due to NATO - the NORSAR connection from the early 70's was because the seismic array was a way of keeping track of Soviet missile tests), and only to a few institutions.

Fascinating, do you think this is the reason why Linux started there?

I mean, it can't have hurt, but Linus started programming long before he started university, and I assume he had no access before he started so odds are he had the interest already. It might have eased access to some material he needed, but you slower connections weren't a huge limitation back then either.

When I was at Kent (88-91) the few rooms which did have connections (only available in the new-build Darwin Houses at the time, IIRC) had basic serial ports. The colleges (not dorms, if you please!) had dedicated computer rooms (using mostly old TA Alphatronics as terminals) with a PAD connecting them to the Cambridge Ring campus network. We had full email/FTP privileges for the Internet (the term 'JANET' was still used, but it was becoming less prominent) but mostly only read-only Usenet privileges, unless you asked the right person very nicely.

JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and Scandinavia.)

You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.

Yes, SRCNET/SERCNET/JANET were great as a physics researcher, despite what people have said about X.25. A potentially interesting point is that TCP/IP on JANET originally ran over X.25 until X.25 was finally phased out.

You could also connect to JANET hosts from commercial machines over X.25.

I had an account on the NRS host machine to administer our site info.

I don't remember all the details, but allegedly some undergraduates at a college very close to me in the late 80s were able to get limited Internet access by snagging the passwords of CS postgrads who had remote accounts at UCL via Janet, and logging in when they weren't around.

Boy, those scalliwags would have got into a lot of trouble if they had got caught.

JANET started running IP-over-X25 in 1991 and within a year the volume of IP traffic was greater than the volume of native JANET traffic.

It was certainly in place at the launch of SuperJanet in 1993, where 55 Universities each got a 34Mbps connection. I could believe only 2Mb to the USA, but it had a number of connections to europe and UK ISPs that were faster.

NB by 1999 is was 2X 155Mb to the US, and by Feb 2002 became 2X 2.5Gbps.

The connections to Europe were great. Relied on all those lovely FTP archives in Scandinavia.

The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't remember when you could first easily interact with the Internet.)

It looks like Archive.org has it.

https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distrib...

I was in the basement of UCL computer science (in the Pearson building) in 1988. Our lab had a very special yellow (Don't ever touch that!!) cable that ran across the ceiling between joists, then off under UCH toward Telecom tower. Of course we hung bits of origami on it with cotton. Apparently that was JANET. I never heard anyone say "The Internet" back then, but we did have a coms lecture where "inter-networking" was a thing. Nice to read some old names in that piece.

Until relatively recently I worked with JANET (or Janet - lower case - as it is now) as part of Jisc, the UK's NREN. I also worked with the wider European org, GEANT, that runs the academic networks across Europe. We were (and still are ) very proud of Janet.

Thanks for your service. I did not know JANET was formed in April 1984. Then I was still at school, and we had a teletype that you could send emails. Of course those days no one had email so we had a class of kids sending emails to each other to print out on tty paper. I think the broader implications may have been lost in that lesson. It wes probably a BBS rather than JANET.

I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.

Nice to meet you. Yeah the smell of overcooked circuits down there was something eh? I forget my room number now but there was something called the Pyramid next door that was mysterious and hush-hush. Phil Treleaven was my prof (saw him outside Waterstones last time I was around ULU so he must still be there).

Haha, yes, the Pyramid was alien technology, but the cover story was that it was a multiprocessor RISC minicomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology When I arrived at UCL, there were three PDP 11/44s of which one (?) was shared by all the undergrads. The pyramid replaced those circa 1987 and was a huge improvement.

If I recall correctly, the main workstation lab was B10A, where I spent a lot of time. Then there was a narrow room, B09 I think, that had mission control on the right hand side with a machine room behind it, and a second machine room on the left side. Can't remember which machine room the Pyramid was in.

And yes, Phil is still around.

The POP11s were a rack of ribs when I saw them, so I figure you must be one of the older boys. Awesome. Totally pm me man. im at @cybershow.uk

Memories. I had an unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet port, with public static IP, in my dorm room at Manchester Uni in 2000 thanks to JANET. It was amazing compared to the ISDN line at home (...which until then I had thought was the bees knees). It took almost another 15 years before I could get something faster at home than what I'd had at uni (!)

I even hosted a mirror of the original Mozilla source code dump from St. Anselm Hall, and nobody ever complained ;P

I think knowledge was more localised to certain universities or researchers.

Norway was the first country outside of USA to be connected to Arpanet in 1973 to share seismic data, but the universities did not gain general access until 1983.

I posted submitted a link to a story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655568

IIRC Finland was connected by then.

By '73? My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway, and only NORSAR and maybe one other location. NORSAR only because it was a critically important seismic array used by NATO to monitor Soviet missile tests.

As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few years earlier.

[1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/

[2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action...

[3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet network. The following message can be seen as the beginning of the Finnish Internet."

> My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway

I speak enough Norwegian to have gone around a few museums that tourists and other foreigners don't usually visit, and this is my understanding too.

That sounds about right. I was working at the NSF in the late 80s, around when they were uniting all the scattered mini nets into Teh Interwebz, and I was trading emails with Finns. And BTW I was not trying to compete.

I do understand your urge to turn this into a competition - but let's not.

Far be it from me to step between Sweden and Finland but this might be a moment to mention from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

(which of course applies to your comments as well)

Fair.

But I think we had it handled.

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