[ih] AUP revision to allow commercial traffic

[Jack Haverty]

On 12/22/2015 08:52 AM, John Curran wrote:
> Definitely the case - there was quite a bit of interconnection (including to commercial firms) 
> prior to 1991.   

When I went to Oracle in mid-1990, Oracle was already "on the Internet"
and had its own private internal Internet as well spanning dozens of
sites worldwide.  It never occurred to me then that this might be novel
or unusual -- after being at BBN for the prior 13 years in the middle of
the Internet fray, I guess I thought that of course everybody was on the
net...

IIRC, at that time, the interconnection at Oracle only supported mail
transfers, with only a few exceptions (like the machine that was
dual-homed).  But I never asked about the details -- in particular,
whether that restriction was imposed by Oracle or by the other side of
our interconnect.

It might have been a technical limitation.  To simplify the
configuration of all the routers, we assigned IP addresses to our
internal sites without regard for the public IP assignments, so there
were many computers inside Oracle using IP addresses that were
officially assigned to someone else.   Interconnecting a private
internet to the Internet was a different problem from interconnecting
your campus LAN, and the router technology wasn't very supportive of
such topologies.  Interconnection at the IP routing level with
non-unique addresses would have been bad....

Also back in 1990 I did some consulting work with a big Wall Street firm
who were deploying their own internal internet linking NY, London, and
Tokyo.  I can't remember the details, but I don't think they were
planning to interconnect at all with the public Internet, at least at
first.   But I recall that I could send them email, so there must have
been some kind of interconnect.

Does anybody know more about the *kinds* of interconnections that were
legal, illegal, feasible, and/or commonly used back in those early days?
 E.G., was there any distinction between full IP connectivity (pass IP
datagrams), versus limited protocol connectivity (perhaps FTP/SMTP
only?). versus single-purpose connectivity (email only)?

What did the "outsiders" do when they were first allowed to somehow
interconnect to the public Internet?  Seems like that part of the story
might be of historical interest....

/Jack Haverty