[ih] Who Paid for the Internet? (was Re: sad news: Peter Kirstein)

[Toerless Eckert]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 04:59:19PM +0000, Olivier MJ Cr?pin-Leblond via Internet-history wrote:
> c. UKC UUCP Gateway - The UUCP gateway at the University of Kent at
> Canterbury. It was impossible to send email out via this gateway if your
> site was not registered with UKC. Incoming email through this route
> would trigger an email sent to me telling me "A message has been
> received for you. Please contact xxx to arrange for delivery of this
> message". I think that later, it mentioned who the sender was so I could
> email the sender to tell them to route via @uunet.uu.net or
> @decwrl.dec.com or @uucp.sun.com or @cunyvm.cuny.edu should incoming be
> via UKACRL --- all of the "free" paths.

Message routing in UUCP times was fun. You where providing your email
address down to a global map known point and as a sender you could steer
traffic across more or less congested paths.  My email for example was:

   {pyramid,unido}!fauern!eckert

where unido was the main UUCP entry point (University Dortmund) in
Germany, always heavily overloaded, so the friendly folks (csg and
others) at pyramid allowed me to connect via X.25 directly to them.
Which then entailed understanding of how not to become transit for all
of German UUCP traffic.

> I suppose that back then many of us users didn't ask "who is paying for
> it". It was pretty much a "well, I am not, but someone else obviously
> is". Of course when acceptable use policies came into effect, many
> people found out the real costs.

Or else you just collaborate with some HEP organization and draw 
from the seemingly unlimited funding from DoE. I think that was 
stadnard financing for a lot of EU/US interconnection traffic for
several years.

Cheers
    Toerless

> Kindest regards,
> 
> Olivier
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> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
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---
tte at cs.fau.de