- EUnet
The roots of EUnet (originally an abbreviation for European
UNIX Network) go back to 1982 and the first internationalUUCP connections. From a very loose collaboration of individual sites under the auspices of theEUUG (European UNIX Users Group) (laterEurOpen ), it evolved to the fully commercial entity EUnet International Ltd.In April 1998 the company was sold to
Qwest Communications International, which in turn later merged EUnet in to the illfatedKPNQwest . Some of the ISPs operating under the name EUnet today can be traced back to the original EUnet, some not.Most national EUnet affiliate or subsidiaries predated other commercial Internet offerings in the respective countries by many years.
To completely understand the importance and history of EUnet, it is important to realize that till the early 1990s nearly every European country had a telecommunications monopoly with an incumbent national PTT and that commercial and non-commercial provision of telecommunications services was prohibited or at least took place in a legal "grey zone". During the same period, as part of an industrial political strategy to stop US domination of future network technology, the
EC embarked on efforts to promoteOSI protocols, founding for example RARE and associated national "research" network operators (DFN ,SURFnet ,SWITCH to name a few).Timeline
1982 UUCP links established between 4 countries (UK, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden)
1984kremvax April Fools Joke
1988 First IP links
1990 First offerings for "all comers"
1996 EUnet International formed by share swaps with seven of the national organisations
1998 Sale toQwest for $154.4 mioPeople
*
Daniel Karrenberg
*Piet Beertema
*Julf Helsingius
*Glenn Kowack
* [http://www.lucdevos.com Luc De Vos]External links
* [http://www.godfatherof.nl Piet Beertema]
* [http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_eunet.htm Living Internet article]
* [http://wwwpdp.web.cern.ch/wwwpdp/ns/ben/TCPHIST.html CERN Internet History]
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