original backbones

Mark Horton (mark@stargate.COM)
15 Oct 90 22:26:53 EDT (Mon)

By the way, I've seen mention crediting Bill Shannon with the decvax link.
Bill was there and involved, but most of the credit goes to Armando Stettner
of DEC, who made it happen and got the phone bill footed. At one point in
the early 80's he announced at Usenix that decvax's phone bill was running
a quarter million dollars/year, officially sanctioned by DEC as a goodwill
gesture to the net!

Even earlier than that, someone at research (Bell Labs Murray Hill) allowed
research to be set up as the center of the universe. The first cross-country
link was from duke to research, then from research to ucbvax, all on
research's nickel. I remember, while at Berkeley, exchanging email with
the original A news developers, and being amazed that I could get a reply
back a few hours later, even though research was polling both duke and ucbvax
to pick up waiting mail.

Mark

This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16