[ih] Commercial ISPs (Re: Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership)

[Louis Mamakos]

On Oct 12, 2010, at 3:45 PM, Scott Brim wrote:

> On 10/12/2010 15:00 EDT, Ofer Inbar wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 08:03:49PM -0700,
>> jfh <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>>> Somewhere along the line, commercial ISPs popped into being.  I'm
>>> not sure who was first, but my recollection is that this happened as
>>> spinoffs from NSFNet and/or CSNet.  Again, there must have been some
>>> kind of agreements between those commercial entities and a piece of
>>> the government, detailing the rules about ownership.  These first
>>> ISPs were different because they were not research collaborators.
>>> They were in business simply to make money selling Internet service.
>> 
>> Software Tool & Die's (aka "the World") was the first commercial
>> consumer ISP, and UUNET was the first commercial IP network provider -
>> who sold IP service to STD.
> 
> The way I remember it:
> 
> STD provided Internet services but they were not a network.
> 
> UUNET was a non-profit exchange, not a network, until 1990 (?)

More accurately, UUNET Communication Services was started by USENIX 
to provide paid UUCP and USENET news service for those that
couldn't find a friendly neighbor site for a UUCP connection.  UUNET
became a major UUCP hub for email and news.

Sometime later, UUNET Technologies, Inc. was started as a separate
enterprise, picking up the customers of the previous entity (and
paying a royalty back to the original company for some period of time)
that helped fund various good works.  It also started a commercial
IP backbone service, and then later sought venture funding to expand
the IP part of the business.  That was about the time that I joined
in 1995; the nascent backbone was already running by then.

It was a bit later that along with PSI and others, started an early
multi-party Internet exchange operated by MFS Datanet.  UUNET was a
customer of that exchange and it certainly wasn't non-profit as far
as MFS was concerned.

For quite some time, UUNET was a major email gateway interconnect
between UUCP-based email and the Internet; as well for USENET news
via UUCP and over the Internet with NNTP.

Louis Mamakos