[ih] Where it All Started: Panel Discussion on the Birth of the European Internet [RIPE NCC - South East Europe 12 Meeting in Athens, Greece]

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

 John Gilmore via Internet-history writes:

 > <SNIP>

 > The Center for Seismic Studies was another example, funded to bring
 > classified Soviet nuclear explosion test monitoring data from Norway to
 > Northern Virginia, and meanwhile letting anybody in Europe piggyback
 > free email and netnews traffic on that expensive ...!seismo!mcvax!
 > undersea leased line.  Again, that cover traffic was trivial to wiretap
 > at the cable landing where it crossed the US border.  The CSS experience
 > led directly to the Uunet centralized-uucp mail and netnews service,
 > which then led to forming the second US commercial ISP, also called
 > Uunet.  Uunet and its first big customer The Microsoft Network were
 > instrumental in launching the rapid Internet expansion of the 1990s.

Interesting story but note that the seismo!mcvax link did already
exist (long) before the data about nuclear explosion test data went
over that route.

mcvax was a central hub for uucp connection various parts of Europe
(and the world) to the world. The CWI could do this because it was
all done on a cost recovery  base.  When the bandwidth via dial-up
and X.25 lines couldn't handle the traffic anymore we decided to
have a fixed line in and seismo was willing to host the US part of
that. It just fitted in the fiscal year, A bummer was that there
due to some misinformation, the line costed twice what we calculated.
You'll find some details in "Casting the net" by Peter Salus.

So, no, there was no an expensive undersea leased line between
seismo and mcvax. I wonder where these embellishments about "expensive
wiretapped" line comes from. Furthermore, mcvax was located in
Amsterdam (NL), not in Norway.

	jaap