4 ms·
There is no mystery here. The "spy country" link is more of a coincidence; after all, the Internet was a DARPA project, and Northern Virginia is where a lot of
by gtrubetskoy 10y ago
There is no mystery here. The "spy country" link is more of a coincidence; after all, the Internet was a DARPA project, and Northern Virginia is where a lot of defense and government stuff is.
When DARPA Internet was turned over to the public, one of the largest interconnect points was at 8100 Boone Blvd (Tysons Corner), known as MAE East [1]. Once upon a time I had access to it, as did countless other people running small ISPs around the area and renting rack space in that building. But the building (it's actually three buildings, and the MAE gigabit switch [2] was in the basement across the street) was not really suitable for any kind of a data center, though above.net did manage to convert the whole level of a parking garage into one, albeit with very low ceilings.
Pretty soon everyone figured out that by Dulles airport rent is way cheaper, you can build from scratch, there is plenty of electricity and water and connectivity is cheap, and AOL was out that way too.
That's pretty much the story. Amazon barely existed then. There used to be a nice bookstore nearby called "Computer Literacy Bookshop", which eventually went all online and later got acquired by Amazon or B&N, can't remember...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East
[2] http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012,filename=mae-east-in-the-parking-garage.jpg http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012...
- walrus01 10y agoPretty much the same reason why there are a ton of carrier exchange points in certain geographic areas of the SF Bay area. Or why the Westin Building in Seattle and One Wilshire in Los Angeles have become the defacto carrier exchange points/peering locations. Large numbers of ISPs began accretion in certain buildings in the mid to late 1990s and the process has continued through its own inexorable inertia.
- greglindahl 10y agoIIRC when the Internet actually formed there were 7 places that you needed to be at in order to have settlement-free peering. Looking at various not-so-organized Wikipedia articles it appears that I am not recalling the earliest days. I think all of these still exist; MAE-WEST is still at 55 South Market in San Jose, for example. At one point blekko moved into a brand new datacenter in Santa Clara which had only limited fiber connectivity. @ChuckMcM twisted their arm for a free interconnect to MAE-WEST so that we could move over our existing inexpensive transit and interconnect contracts. Everyone's in MAE-WEST.
- jlgaddis 10y agoI was just a pre/early teen when most of this was happening but I can remember reading about it and being amazed, after becoming interested after reading _The Cuckoo's Egg_. Today, I'm a network engineer at an ISP. Go figure. > MAE-WEST is still at 55 South Market in San Jose, for example. Yep, and fiber runs from there to 611 Folsom and into Room 641A. (Edit: It probably wasn't quite that early in the Internet's life but it was still very young.)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jlgaddis 10y agoClickable image link (hotlinking is apparently disabled): http://imgur.com/a/JXjtD http://imgur.com/a/JXjtD
- antongribok 10y agoAOL's first campus was actually in Tyson's Corner as well, but on the other side. I can't remember exactly, but it was either at the end of Westwood Center Dr or Spring Hill Rd. I don't remember when they started moving out to Ashburn/Dulles, but I know for sure they still had 3 brick buildings in Tyson's in 1997.
- lostboys67 10y agoOne of the reasons Bletchly Park was chosen in WW2 was it was close to some of the core trunk network