Simon PooleNovember 1994 I did a company internal presentation on IPng (the competing proposals that would eventually give us IPv6), more than 30 years later I'm still exclusively using an IPv4 network at home ... sigh.
One of the depressing things about looking back to 88/89 is that is when open systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing) really started winning, networking and the #Internet being one of the levers that worked in our favour.
But instead of getting a multitude of interoperable operating system we ended up with a duopoly.
"One of the main problems of the "Internet" today is that it is -near- to impossible to earn money from "non-connectivity" services.
This is less a technology problem .., it's
just practically impossible to find a service to provide that somebody else is not doing for free."
myself, ch.network, July 31st 1992
I suppose this still kind of holds true for ISPs which was the topic of the discussion at the time.
In "stuff that I've forgotten", did I coin the term "transit" (in an ISP context)? https://diswww.mit.edu/menelaus.mit.edu/com-priv/11171 probably not, though nobody else is using it.
In any case an interesting discussion that underlines how different the early Internet was from the fairy tales that are popular these days.
PS: turning that mailing list archive in to something more readable might be a worth while undertaking @brewsterkahle
[email protected]: [11171] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Sigh .... trying to not rant about @wikipedia having so ridiculously bad entries for both #EUnet and #OpenStreetMap
Being a primary source has really massive downsides sometimes.
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I don't have any mail archives from that period (for obvious reasons), but maybe somebody can remember.
What I'm specifically trying to pinpoint is when we started registering CH domains for UUCP sites, it doesn't seem this was announced anywhere that has survived the not quite 4 decades and maybe we just sent a mail at the time. So the UUCP maps might be the only way to at least roughly date it.
Just for those wondering: while we were connecting to the shared and #EUnet co-financed Internet access in Geneva at CERN at this time, and this was the actual first Internet presence in Switzerland operating since 1989, supposedly used by @timbl to demo the WWW in the same year*, we didn't actually provide local Internet access in Geneva till 1993 (we did have mail and news customers there though).
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Have you ever noticed that when the invention of the WWW by @timbl is discussed CERN is in Switzerland, just to mysteriously change countries when the first Internet connection in the country is mentioned?
Must be a quantum effect.
The next couple of weeks you are all going to have to suffer from a bout of Internet nostalgia from me as I dig through my archives.
This is from a February 1993 mail that I sent to colleagues at other #EUnet national orgs asking for them to update the POP (50 total) list I was maintaining, giving the current Swiss status as an example. I had completely forgotten that Basel had been our first POP outside of Zürich in June 92, Geneva, Berne and Lugano followed the same year. ...