[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Karl Auerbach]

About the Little Garden ...

I am sure that John G. will have many more details ..

 From the point of view of my company (Epilogue Technology) and John 
Romkey (part of the company) we were getting rather tired of bumping 
into barriers when we began to extend our connectivity beyond Usenet to 
encompass the nascent Internet, especially in the San Francisco 
peninsula area.

John Romkey was our lead on this and one day he and I (and I think Dave 
Bridgham) gathered with John G. and others at the Little Garden Chinese 
Restaurant in Palo Alto to figure out what to do.  I was essentially an 
observer.

I'm not sure who funded what - Epilogue might have contributed some $$, 
but if we did it probably was not a lot.  I think all of the money came 
out of our own pockets, mostly Gilmore's.  My company didn't really have 
offices - many of us wee working out of our homes - and Romkey already 
had a garage filled with Telebit modems and machines running usenet 
stuff - I I don't remember the details except that it was a lot of 
machines and wires and clearly something that grew ad hoc rather than 
from a plan.  I do remember the Pacific Bell telco people being amazed 
at how many phone circuits were going into one house.

Romkey's place was up on the hill in Belmont, my place was down at the 
bottom of the hill, so all of our company networking went via Romkey's 
garage.  (I also got some net access courtesy John Rushby and his 
Foonley Four machine at SRI [Rushby and I had worked together on 
security stuff at SDC and at RSRE in Great Malvern in the UK.])

I was never very clear about how we were wired to the Little Garden or 
for how long.

Romkey got Postel to assign "aslyum.sf.ca.us" as a domain name for his 
garage in Belmont, California.  Eventually John moved it all back to 
Boston - but still keeping the asylum.sf.ca.us domain name - and thus 
being one of the first to break the idea of geographic allocation of 
host and domain names.

     --karl--


On 5/10/26 6:14 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 5/10/2026 5:49 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote:
>> The regional networks were
>> partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting 
>> over a
>> 5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and
>> CERFNET were commercial operators...
>
>
> As an outside observer, I feel compelled to ask where The Little 
> Garden fits into the funding model?
>
> d/
>
> ps. As an inside participant, I feel compelled to note the the NSFNet 
> funding/transition model was first tested 3 years earlier, with CSNet...
>
>
> d/
>
>