25 years “Individual Network e.V.”

Heiko Schlichting reminds us that 25 years ago, on the 20./21. of June 1992, the Individual Network e.V. was created (Text in German). Individual Network e.V. was a NGO of NGOs, a construct where local citizen network NGOs could be members. Individual Network would then make contracts with the German Science Network DFN and other providers and buy traffic rights in bulk, in order to allow its members to use this traffic for non-commercial, private use.

In order to allow local NGOs to connect to the German Science Network DFN locally using the local university lines, Individual Network had to have some connection to DFN in order to be a member and customer. In the end it was decided that Individual Network would finance two X.25 lines into DFN at 50% each, with the local NGO taking the endpoint financing the other half.

That is how the NGO I represented, Toppoint Mailbox e.V., ended up with a 9600 bps X.25 line on 1.10.1992. This ended the era of long-distance dialup at Toppoint Kiel (well, not quite) and introduced a permanent link to the Internet. That was well before the first web servers, so SMTP, NNTP and FTP were the order to the day.

People connected to Toppoint using dial-up modems, ISDN dial-ups or semi-permanent (pre-conncted) ISDN dialups. Speeds were up to 128 kbps, using channel bundling. I had a PI /24 those days, for home use, costing me 50 DM, one time.

Also, people reminded me of ...!mcshh!tpki!kriski!kris. Yes, we did not use DNS back then, but had to name all hosts in the path of a mail. And hostnames are globally unique (yep, that scales even less than IP V4).

See also: Neuland .