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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.)

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