How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)
53 comments
·January 9, 2025cpr
ManuelKiessling
Dear Sir, could you just, you know, continue writing? I just love these stories, would love to hear more!
coffeecantcode
If this man wrote a book I’d read it.
mromanuk
Yes, please! I love these comments on HN, this is blog material.
mhandley
I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had wonderful stories to tell.
In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due.
When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.
nxobject
If only it could have disappeared into a vault until now... the bill could have been inflated away!
gnufx
The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)
nxobject
The most hilari-depressing part of the story was the funding politics and grantwriting headaches that have never changed:
– the NPL couldn't set up a British inter-network because of pressure from GPO;
– they couldn't connect to ARPA via Norway because of the Foreign Office;
– then, UCL couldn't get funding from SERC;
– then, UCL couldn't get funding from DTI because it didn't have industrial interest (although, to be fair, it was the department of "industry")...
...and then nearly a decade later government bodies were trying to take it over.
(It looks like the IMP/TIP was literally funded by petty-ish £££ that the NPL superintendent could get his hands on without further approval. To be fair, GPO did fund the link to Oslo.)
mhandley
Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet, he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never tried to hold them to it later.
Full_Clark
Spot on. Would be interesting to see what sort of hoops you'd have to jump through in an academic lab today to secure similar money.
That 5k GPB in 1973 is 77k in today's pound, or about 95k USD at current exchange rates.
ChildOfChaos
Peter Kirstein died in January 2020, likely around the time when the internet finally reached Wales.
lysace
So I was just reading through a 1988 Swedish popular book on "data communications". Not a single word on Arpanet/etc. Many other network technologies and attempts at global networks described.
My point: "Internet" wasn't very well-known "even" in 1988 outside of well-connected places.
Book: Scandinavian PC Systems, Valentino Berti: "Introduktion till datakommunikation"
kjellsbells
The inter-networking part of Internet was specialist knowledge restricted to those researchers actively working in the space. But countries had rich national networks back then, e.g. UK universities had a thing called JANET (joint academic network) that allowed, say, someone at the University of Kent to send files to someone at the University of Durham. The hosts were heterogeneous but the protocols were kinda sorta in place (there was a lot of X.25 leased lines and UUCP dialup, if I recall). Kent sticks in my memory because they could do commercial email in the old path!to!destination style if you knew the right guy to call. And Durham because they had this incredibly wacky mainframe OS, Michigan Terminal System, which I have never seen anywhere except there and at Newcastle (a town 40km up the road from Durham).
qingcharles
Any idea when JAnet connected to the Internet? When I first used it ~1994 I remember they had a single 2Mbps connection to the USA for the whole of JAnet.
What connection did the housing in the dorms at Kent have? I seem to remember serial ports in the rooms, but could have been ether?
vidarh
I have fond memories of the Nordic university network (NORDUnet) when the US<-->Sweden link was upgraded to 34Mbps in '95 (NORDUnet kept 24Mbps of the cable initially). At the time the fastest connection between the US and elsewhere in Europe was 6Mbps, according to the NORDunet 25 year report....
At one point there was an outage of the Sprint connection to Sweden that the Nordic connection to the US went over, and the Nordic countries for several hours saturated connections throughout parts of Europe that were in no way at a scale suitable to be a functional backup for the traffic from the Nordic countries...
It was first later I realised how spoiled we'd been... Tens of Mbps FTP speeds to other Nordic countries was routine in 94/95, for example.
dannyobrien
I don't remember all the details, but allegedly some undergraduates at a college very close to me in the late 80s were able to get limited Internet access by snagging the passwords of CS postgrads who had remote accounts at UCL via Janet, and logging in when they weren't around.
Boy, those scalliwags would have got into a lot of trouble if they had got caught.
mhandley
UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet when I joined in 1985, and provided a relay service between the two for email and for telnet. Maybe others - not sure. Relaying email required translating the address order as the UK used big-endian "foo@uk.ac.ucl.cs" and the rest of the world used little-endian "foo@cs.ucl.ac.uk". There were a whole set of heuristics to figure out which order the destination should be, which worked fine up until Czechoslovakia joined with their .cs domain. I think it was probably in the early 90s when JAnet fully deployed IP-over-X.25, and all UK universities became IP-reachable, but some would have been reachable before then.
Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and stickers for travelling abroad).
fanf2
JANET started running IP-over-X25 in 1991 and within a year the volume of IP traffic was greater than the volume of native JANET traffic.
TheOtherHobbes
JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and Scandinavia.)
You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.
gnufx
The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't remember when you could first easily interact with the Internet.)
null
Kye
It looks like Archive.org has it.
https://archive.org/details/michigan-terminal-system-distrib...
euroderf
IIRC Finland was connected by then.
lysace
I do understand your urge to turn this into a competition - but let's not.
dang
Far be it from me to step between Sweden and Finland but this might be a moment to mention from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
(which of course applies to your comments as well)
nonrandomstring
I was in the basement of UCL computer science (in the Pearson building) in 1988. Our lab had a very special yellow (Don't ever touch that!!) cable that ran across the ceiling between joists, then off under UCH toward Telecom tower. Of course we hung bits of origami on it with cotton. Apparently that was JANET. I never heard anyone say "The Internet" back then, but we did have a coms lecture where "inter-networking" was a thing. Nice to read some old names in that piece.
grumblepeet
Until relatively recently I worked with JANET (or Janet - lower case - as it is now) as part of Jisc, the UK's NREN. I also worked with the wider European org, GEANT, that runs the academic networks across Europe. We were (and still are ) very proud of Janet.
mhandley
I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.
corford
Memories. I had an unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet port, with public static IP, in my dorm room at Manchester Uni in 2000 thanks to JANET. It was amazing compared to the ISDN line at home (...which until then I had thought was the bees knees). It took almost another 15 years before I could get something faster at home than what I'd had at uni (!)
peterstjohn
I even hosted a mirror of the original Mozilla source code dump from St. Anselm Hall, and nobody ever complained ;P
timthorn
> The little black book of the internet
The article doesn't mention the Coloured Book protocols, but I'm pretty sure this phrasing isn't accidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
gnufx
Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security) long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer centres.
sourraspberry
Time-sharing is interesting. The same kind of thing is happening now with AI.
ggm
I had the great fortune to work at UCL in the early 1980s, just as SATNET came to an end as a project. I worked on what became ISODE, and related stuff as well as doing operations bits and pieces. I was far too junior to figure in Peter's planning but I will say, he was a very interesting HoD: he didn't suffer fools gladly (and I am one) but at the same time could be quite forgiving, if you were at least entertaining about your foolishness.
His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol) project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe, and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection.
The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec and Sun workstations.
We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject works.
Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup.
Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against" any proposal they brought to the table without question: Departmental politics ran deep.
Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible.
UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then. Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit personified.
dang
I've put 2018 as an approximation above because the intro says "a few years before he died" in 2020. If anybody can figure out the actual year, we can change it.
Edit: in HN titles, if you see a year at the end in parens, that indicates the year that the article originated. If you see a year that's not at the end in parens, that's part of the article title, meaning it's probably about something that happened that year. That's the convention anyhow.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn
"The impact of the internet on our way of life in its first 40 years has been immeasurable. It has expanded and developed in a way none of us envisaged in 1975", suggesting 2015?
dang
Not sure how literally to take the 40 but that's at least more precise than "a few" so I've switched to 2015 above. Thanks!
dang
[stub for offtopicness]
crankyOldGuy
Sorry if I'm unclear on what 2018 is supposed to mean (understand it's an approximation). But internet service is much older than that. According to Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom
Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing dial-up Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial Internet service provider (ISP).
That's about the same time it became available in the U.S. I got home internet service (dial-up) in the mid-1990's.
philipkglass
2018 is the estimated year of the article, not the events described in the article.
jlund-molfese
Some of the other comments are joking around, but 2018 refers to the original date the article was published :)
Symbiote
> Pipex was established in 1990
I know reading the article is very much out of fashion, but all the dates given in the article are in the 1970s.
Just like the dates in the Wikipedia article you linked.
That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer.
Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...
And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)
(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.
Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.