[ih] Early Internet history

[Louis Mamakos]

On 6 Jul 2018, at 16:40, Johan Helsingius wrote:

> On 06/07/18 20:53, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
>
>> No, 'uunet' was a commercial UUCP hub, started up by Rick Adams.
>>   It handled a great volume of mail and news traffic, as well as an
>> extensive public file archive.  It eventually morphed into Alternet,
>> one of the very first commercial Internet providers.
>
> Technically "Alternet" was a product/service provided by UUNET,
> the company established by Rick (and funding by Usenix) when
> he transferred the USENET node from seismo (Center for Seismic
> Studies) where he was the admin.

More accurately, "UUNET Communication Services" was the USENIX
non-profit entity.  This spawned UUNET Technologies, Inc, which
was a for-profit entity, which raised private equity and eventually
did an IPO.  ALTERNET was the product name of the Internet
service, presumably selected to differentiate that service from
the dial-up UUCP/USENET offering.  The ALTERNET / UUNET backbone
was at the time one of the largest global tier-1 ISPs.

UUNET Technologies was acquired by MFS, and later acquired by
WorldCom and some might recall how that later worked out.

For some period of time, UUNET Technologies paid USENIX a royalty
for the UUNET Communications UUCP/USENET business that was folded into
UUNET Technologies.

louie
(formerly, louie at uu.net)