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

[Steve Crocker]

In my previous note re The Little Garden, I wrote:  I had a little bit of
interaction with The Little Garden.  I believe it was an independent effort
without government funding, but others can speak more authoritatively.

I was actually directly involved in one aspect of The Little Garden, but I
wasn't a principal and had no involvement in its overall life.

I worked for Trusted Information Systems (TIS), which had been founded and
run by Steve Walker.  Its headquarters were in Maryland.  I joined TIS in
late 1986 and opened the Los Angeles office, which I ran until I moved to
Maryland in September 1989.  We paid for a UUNET connection, which
satisfied our needs at the time.  A short time after opening the LA office,
TIS also opened a very small office in the Bay Area.  We wanted to connect
them as well, but cost was an issue.  I forget who approached whom, but
Rick Adams permitted us to connect the Bay Area office, allowed The Little
Garden to connect off of our line, and agreed to pay a portion of our
costs.  Rick did not generally permit UUNET customers to sell their
connectivity to others, so this was a special favor.  IIRC, John Gilmore
took a liberal view of his rights, and went into business anyway adding
other nodes.

Steve


On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 2:58 PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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/
> >
> >
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