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

[Ofer Inbar]

Scott Brim <sbrim at cisco.com> wrote:
> STD provided Internet services but they were not a network.
>
> UUNET was a non-profit exchange, not a network, until 1990 (?)
> 
> PSINet was started as a network, with NYSERNet members as an instant
> installed base, in 1989.

STD didn't have TCP/IP connectivity until UUNET started providing
that, which was either 1990 or 1991, I'm pretty sure.  Somewhere in my
email archive is a message from a friend - who I'd gotten to sign up
for a World account - telling me that he could now telnet or get on
IRC or something, and my disbelieving response (because I "knew" that
actual Internet connectivity was not allowed for public accounts like
that), so if I find that I could get the approximate date.  Again, if
there's anyone from STD on this list they can probably get the exact
date.

Saying that STD was "not a network" is ambiguous in the current context.

It was "not a network" but neither were the rest of the consumer ISPs
that followed them in the next few years.  IP to the home was very
rare.  Mostly, people got dialup accounts to Unix servers where they
logged in to a shell from which they could run stuff, and those places
were generally called "pubnix" accounts (public unix), and STD was the
first pubnix to offer such a shell account with IP connectivity.  Soon
many of them also started offerring PPP so your dialup account would
give your home computer a temporary IP address, but the ISPs were
still just offering dialup accounts to their servers; the "network"
portion was piggybacked on the existing circuit-switched telephone
network.

So in the early/mid 90s, ISPs and network providers were mostly
separate things.  An ISP was who you dialed into, whose server was in
turn connected to the net via a network provider.  But the ISP still
needed to be on the network, so it had its own IP allocation, and in
the early 90s it was routability of those blocks that was the issue.
And if course if you used PPP dialup, your public IP address came out
of the ISP's block too.  So in the context of IP addresses, the ISP
was your network.
  -- Cos