An avenue commemorates the early German Internet
A monument and an avenue at TU Dortmund University recall EUnet, the origin of the Internet in Germany. The ceremony will take place on Friday at Campus North.
(Image: Graphics Master/Shutterstock.com)
Dortmund has just successfully mastered the last European Championship match and another highlight is about to follow. This Friday, a section of road on the north campus of the Technical University will be renamed "EUnet-Allee". It is a reminder that the German representation of the European Unix User Group existed in Dortmund, which set up the EUnet (European UNIX Network) from 1982. EUnet emerged from this student networking project as a company, one of the first German Internet service providers (ISP). In addition to renaming the section of road from Martin-SchmeiĂźer-Platz to the building of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering "EUnet-Alle", an EUnet sculpture is inaugurated to commemorate the pioneering work. TU Dortmund University celebrates the pioneering work of computer scientists Daniel Karrenberg, Axel Pawlik, Rudolf Peter and RĂĽdiger Volk with the inauguration of the "EUnet-Allee". Also present: the Alumni of Informatics Germany, who donate an EUnet sculpture.
EUnet was an initiative of the European Unix User Group, which set out in 1982 from Amsterdam to network their computers with UUCP. This made it possible to exchange mails and Usenet news. At the time the EUnet backbone went live, there were two other nodes in Germany (Xlink in Karlsruhe and GMD near Bonn) and a total of five .de domains. Together with the University of Karlsruhe, TU Dortmund University published the Neuesten Netz-Nachrichten (NNN), which was intended to promote networking in Germany. In the academic world, computer science was still dreaming the OSI dream.
In 1988, EUnet switched to TCP/IP, and in 1990 it became a fairly successful commercial Internet provider with 3,000 connected organizations. In 1997, EUnet was acquired by UUnet for 154.4 million US dollars. When UUnet became a subsidiary of the scandalous company Worldcom, Eunet ended up in the dustbin of telco trench warfare.
Mail from Moscow
EUnet became internationally known in 1984 through an April Fool's joke by EUnet founder Piet Beertema, who published a fictitious e-mail from CPSU General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko. This Kremvax hoax shocked the world: the supreme Soviet leader on a then state-of-the-art Vax computer? EUnet was recognized by the tireless work of EUnet founder Daniel Karrenberg and the management of IP addresses by Axel Pawlik.
It is worth mentioning that a cryptography mailing list ran on EUnet, which was set up in 1986 by the Green Party net politician Manuel Kiper during the "first crypto war". On it, participants discussed the encryption of emails via email. In the same year, the computer scientist Julf Helsingius actually managed to establish a dedicated line to St. Petersburg via the Finnish EUnet node and thus connect the Russian university network Academset to the Internet. As part of this campaign, Helsingius developed the highly controversial remailer anon.penet.fi, which had to be shut down in 1997. The debates about the right to encryption and the obligation to use real names have their roots in the early Internet.
If you can't stroll along the "EUnet Avenue", you can still take a virtual stroll and visit the German Internet Museum, which is being built in Dortmund, or read the issue of Chalisti in which EUnet administrator Anke Goos presented the EUnet at the time.
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