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nic.funet.fi: Serving freely distributable files with FTP since 1990
- johnklos 3y agoIt is so wonderful that we have repositories / archives like FUNET. So much history can be found in one place, along with everything we need to (re)experience what things were like back in the day. As someone who runs an Aminet mirror (us3.aminet.net, which happens to be hosted on a real Amiga), I'm always grateful and appreciative we have resources like these that aren't based on popularity or on the OS du jour. Thanks, FUNET!
- b112 3y agoIs there need for more aminet mirrors? How many TB are they these days? I guess I'm worried there are enough of them. I'd hold an offline archival copy of it helps, at least until I die. I wish someone would create larger WORM media, like those DVDs made of rock.
- Delk 3y agoSome of the appreciation should go to the academic roots, culture and tradition of the early internet. The internet originated at DARPA but many of the earliest participants and adopters were academic institutions. FUNET is the Finnish University and Research Network. They provide backbone connectivity and networking facilities to universities in Finland and have done so for decades. They've also run the public FTP archive (actually HTTPS by now) since 1990. It seems to me that at the time, providing a server that distributed freely distributable and open source software was part of an academic culture of sharing and of providing a public good. (The free software movement also has its roots in the academia. Of course "open source" as a term didn't exist back then, but some of the culture did, without the commercial connotations of open source necessarily.) In today's rather commercialized world, I appreciate it that a public institution still runs such an archive in a similar spirit with no direct commercial interest. (FUNET is run by a state-owned enterprise.)
- juhanima 3y agoTotally agree and thank you for being so perceptive! It was swell to hear someone say aloud "academic culture of sharing and providing for public good". I think that's what humankind would be wise to aim and seek for: equality of all and caring for the welfare of the weakest. University education does not need to be expensive. On the contrary, it can be free.
- anthk 3y agoNot FUNET but from IBIBLIO I've got the sun multimedia sounds for notifications in my machine along herbe. I use beep_casio.au for some calm and unobstrusive sounds for instance with an IRC client on messages or for SPT (simple pomodoro tecnique) to stop/continue working.
- DoneWithAllThat 3y agoStill to this day my default address I use when pinging just to see if a device can talk to the internet. If my packets can make it to Finland they can go anywhere.
- warrenm 3y ago♬If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere♬
- petrikapu 3y agowasn’t linux initially distributed here?
- ciroduran 3y agoon the page: "Linux was first released to the world from here 17.9.1991"
- QuantumG 3y agoAhh the perfect date.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThats an eternal September I can get behind!
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoOh, nic.fune.fi, the first place O learned about in 1992 when I touched Internet for the first time at CERN. As a physicist, I discovered the world of Unix and slowly started my journey to sysadmin - and 30 years later I am still in IT that I love so much.
- thedougd 3y agoCan I use the '...' directory to upload files?
- cynod 3y agoHaha.. that brings back memories! The "..." " ." and ".. " directories were legendary :)
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago>It runs on a Linux server with dual 20 core processors, 786GB of memory and 80+TB of NetApp NFS storage. It has a 2 x 25Gbit/s connection to the Funet backbone. Imagine an IT expert waking up from a coma they had been in since 1991 and seeing this.
- __del__ 3y ago"i think you'll find you mean megabytes of ram and gigabytes of storage" ...cause that's how 90s IT people started most of their sentences
- dobin 3y agoThe only thing i wanted to know is on what a machine it runs. > It runs on a Linux server with dual 20 core processors, 786GB of memory and 80+TB of NetApp NFS storage. And they deliver.
- chx 3y agoI faintly remember when around the turn of the century the Irish equivalent, HEANET put in an Intel Itanic server for a similar purpose (or was it two?). I hope someone will correct me if I remember wrong but it had an absurd amount of memory, like 32GB. ALthough it seems I remember wrong https://hyse.org/pdf/scaling-apache-handout.pdf https://hyse.org/pdf/scaling-apache-handout.pdf > a Dell 2650, with 2 2.4 Ghz Xeon processors, 12Gb of memory but still, there was Merced there, it's just been so long ...
- app4soft 3y agoAnd software it used is here:[0] [0] https://www.funet.fi/pub/local/src/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/local/src/
- p1mrx 3y agoI wonder if 786 GB is a typo, because 256 * 3 = 768.
- 3y ago
- aidenn0 3y agoFTP is such a horribly dated protocol; it's actually older than TCP! The NAT issues are well known, but resolved in a standard way. However, the intersection of {Features defined in RFCs} and {Features implemented in FTP Servers} is much smaller than the sizes of either set. Many useful things are implemented outside of the spec, and most of the spec is not implemented in servers.
- knorker 3y agoDoes server to server transfer using FXP, though. What other protocol does that?
- jedisct1 3y agoSSH can actually do that.
- adamzochowski 3y agoFTP does FXP without either server knowing credentials of the other. How does what you say "SSH" accomplish server to server transfer without exposing credentials of one server to another?
- jedisct1 3y agoscp bob@host1:/tmp/x john@host2:/tmp/ Also SSH can be configured to use different keys for each server.
- jedisct1 3y agoSo many memories! Also nice to see that it's running pure-ftpd.
- wkat4242 3y agoI thought it was ftp.funet.fi . Pretty sure what's what I used back in the day
- juhanima 3y ago32 years ago I had just finished my "erikoistyö" (a pregrad exercise) in CS at the Helsinki Uni about combining object-oriented programming with relational databases and uploaded it to nic.funet.fi for all to see and enjoy - I was that proud of it. Even promised to send a 1.4MB diskette for those who couldn't download it for whatever reason. Cannot help feeling good of seeing it's still there. https://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/computer/oop/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/computer/oop/ Only curiosity value is left probably, but back then it felt like magic to be able to publish something like this on my own. Half a dozen people even asked for the diskette, which I sent to them.
- scrame 3y agoHuh. That's pretty cool. So did you write the first ORM?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- juhanima 3y agoWouldn't claim so - perhaps the ideas were floating in the air. What I know for sure is that my work wasn't used for much. What's more alarming is that it seems those 32 years old files at ftp.funet.fi are mostly unreadable by now. Back then I thought PostScript would last but alas! that is not the case. Ghostcript can show just about the cover page and that's all. Libreoffice does a little bit better with the DOC-file but it's still not quite right. So if there is anything to learn it's about persistent document formats. I wish I had known about LaTeX back then.
- juhanima 3y agoActually PostScript did last, I was just too stupid to realize that one needs to press <enter> for every new page in gv. Anyway: here is the pdf made by ps2pdf: https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf
- zgluck 3y agohttps://ftp.sunet.se/ https://ftp.sunet.se/ (and ftp://ftp.sunet.se) started in 1990 is also still running! History: https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/html/history.html https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/html/histor... The SUNET Archive began its life in 1990 as an ftp archive created by Lars Gunnar Olsson of the IT-Department at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, or SLU, in Ultuna, a few kilometers outside of Uppsala. The archive became a SUNET facility in 1993 and was assigned the name ftp.sunet.se. In the SUNET newsletter SUNETTEN from 1993 it is noted that the archive already contains 4 GB of data and there is room for another 4 GB. By 1994 the SUNET Archive was ranked among the largest and most visited archives in the world. Its total storage capacity was then 28 GB.
- inglor_cz 3y agoI remember sunet.se from my first forays onto the Internet (1996).
- FireBeyond 3y agoThis thread has me trying to remember names of all the old school EFnet servers.
- pedrow 3y agoI fondly remember using sites like this to download stuff (ok, apogee games mostly!) in the 1990s. I could FTP to the university VAX which would exceed my 'soft quota' of disk space every time, then I'd have to get the files onto a floppy and delete them before my account locked up. Does anyone know if the SunSites are still mirrored anywhere? There used to be a dir called 'programming' full of weird and whacky languages which I'd love to see again. For example there was one called ALLOY by Thanasis Mitsolides. His PhD is still available on the internet but the code in usable format is not, as far as I can see.
- tjalfi 3y agoAlloy is available at https://www.funet.fi/pub/languages/alloy/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/languages/alloy/
- zgluck 3y agoAs someone just getting access to the net in '94/'95 and also learning programming via Turbo Pascal around that time, ftp://x2ftp.oulu.fi was a lot more important! Now sadly gone. (https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.msdos.programmer/c/Kcoc7aexmT8 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.msdos.programmer/c/Kcoc7...)
- bluedino 3y agoLoved x2! Any particular reason there seemed like a bunch of ftp sites hosted in Finland?
- zgluck 3y agoI think... both for Finland and Sweden: We wanted to stand out internationally. And there were lots of clever people in the right places early on. And there was money to spend on that exciting new stuff, after the first few early press rounds. But since this on top of HN I hope someone who actually knows will show up soon. :)
- anttihaapala 3y agoI believe it might be just because it is really easy to incorporate an association in Finland and an association that is a non-profit organization founded for public benefit will be considered tax exempt by default. Many of these services have been run by the incorporated associations as opposed to just a loose group of individuals or a single person. The FUNET though is the Finnish university research network and thus I believe the Funet FTP server has always resided on a server funded by the government but still mostly maintained by volunteers.
- petercooper 3y agoOne of my favorites as well! I had a poke around and it seems there's a downloadable archive of it, though at "only" 500MB I'm not sure how complete it is: https://archive.org/details/X2ftpArchive https://archive.org/details/X2ftpArchive
- zgluck 3y ago
- joisig 3y agofunet.fi and sunet.se - quite a bit of nostalgia and gratitude attached to those domains for me, first used them in '91
- bitwize 3y agoIt was funet.fi, sunsite.unc.edu, and prep.ai.mit.edu where I first rounded out my Linux software collection. I remember searching for stuff using Archie for deeper dives. I remember Archie blinking between = and O while it searched various ftp sites. Early internet was the freaking bomb. So much to explore, so many secrets to discover.
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoYes -- we used a UK sunsite mirror mostly; the UNC site would have been quite slow to access until mid '96. Imperial College London? Can't remember.
- lamontcg 3y agonow that's a name i've not heard in a long time... a long time...
- mmaunder 3y agoanon.funet.fi was an anonymous remailer popular with the phreak/hack scene that was shut down around 1996 after Mitnick was arrested and the attitude towards prosecuting hacking became far more militant.
- muyuu 3y agooh man such sweet memories from the mid 90s a wonderful, historical resource
- flykespice 3y agoI like how Finland internet culture seems very oriented to kind acts of offering services for free. Btw there is also a (just as old) free domain hosting service: http://iki.fi http://iki.fi
- tuukkah 3y agoAlso, a non-profit hosts open map data from the government for free: https://kartat.kapsi.fi/ https://kartat.kapsi.fi/
- Ekaros 3y agoI should really get around moving to iki.fi as email address. It is forwarder designed to last forever. Which with companies acting like Google makes lot of sense. Better to be beholden to non-profit that has driven the same mission for long enough time.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoYou could write a whole book about anon.penet.fi. Probably someone has.
- app4soft 3y ago../pub/pics/[0] > planepics.club - FUNET aviation pictures archive[1] > railpics.club - FUNET railway pictures archive[2] [0] https://www.funet.fi/pub/pics/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/pics/ [1] https://www.funet.fi/pub/pics/aviation/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/pics/aviation/ [2] https://www.funet.fi/pub/pics/railways/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/pics/railways/
- nhggfu 3y agowow -blast from the past. I used to ftp stuff from here in 1990.
- ehPReth 3y agoWhat does NIC stand for? Not mentioned in the README..
- vesinisa 3y agoIt's a common acronym across several different networks, especially in the early Internet. I am not exactly sure but I believe it stands for Network Information Center. FUNET is the Finnish UNIversity NETwork, i.e. the early research network that first connected Finland to internet when it was still mostly a tool for researchers to connect and share data. NIC.FUNET.FI would've been the central directory server where you found other services on offer across the larger FUNET, the hub. Mind you search engines would not really exist for several years in 1990. Origin of the acronym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC FUNET history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUNET
- ehPReth 3y agoOh - that makes total sense. Thanks! Quite interesting :)
- opless 3y agoSadly not much in the simtel archive. Does anyone have a better link?
- zgluck 3y agoI think the CD-ROMs at archive.org are your best bet. (Spent some time looking for a functioning ftp mirror a while back and failed.)
- wormius 3y agoI have a spiel about "the old days" (pre-2000) internet, when the Web wasn't the only protocol. How we had FTP, Archie, Veronica, WAIS, Gopher, Telnet, Finger, etc... I'd bring up all the great FTP sites I remembered: spies.com (and "wiretap") funet.fi sunet.se monash.edu ac.oak.oakland.edu I feel like there were a few other great repos out there, but those are the great ones that stuck in my memory.
- warrenm 3y agoback in the late 90s, you could FTP to apple.com and download old (ie unsupported) install disk images of previous version of Mac OS
- sedatk 3y agoftp.sac.sk (antivirus and all the weird compression software), and ftp.nvg.ntnu.no (emulators, ROM and disk images) also come to mind. ftp.hornet.org for early demoscene downloads. of course never forget ftp.simtel.net. My shareware apps I releases in the 90’s are still there somewhere :)
- notbeuller 3y agoprep.ai.mit.edu
- jks 3y agoJust look at all those services available from nic.funet.fi: https://web.archive.org/web/19961105014833/http://nic.funet.fi/FUNET/ftp/cnames.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961105014833/http://nic.funet.... Archie, X.500, ftp, gopher, telnet, irc, mailing lists, USENET, WAIS, WWW (remember to use WWW clients), a caching WWW server for Funet members, Alex ("Global filesystem for all anonymous ftp sites with caching (experimental)") You could telnet into the system with username info and use command-line clients for some of these services if you didn't have access at your home university. I vaguely remember using an email-based service to access web pages: you sent the URL to an address and got a reply with the page contents rendered as text. That probably wasn't Funet but something else.
- gattilorenz 3y agotsx11.mit.edu, where lots of unix and early linux binaries could be found. Unfortunately also university servers retire, and with them we lose the digital history they contain. Shout out to funet.fi and archive.org for taking good care of old files!
- zzo38computer 3y agoFTP is not a very good protocol in my opinion. HTTP, Gopher, and Gemini are better designed (although better is with optional TLS instead of mandatory TLS). Nevertheless, for use with computers that have FTP but not the other protocols, it can be helpful.
- hliyan 3y agoGreat to see a full list of RFCs (including early ones) in such a quickly accessible format: https://www.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.ietf.org/rfc/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.ietf.org/rfc/ most are text files < 20KB and loads instantly.
- mxmlnkn 3y agoThat might be true for the individual RFCs but the index.html for that folder sure takes it time to load, which isn't surprising taken the roughly 10k RFC, which each are present in 5 different file formats. I remember having worse scaling issues in Windows Explorer back in the day when trying to navigate into the folder of Ralf Brown's interrupt list, which also contained more than 10k files. But that took several minutes to open not seconds.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vvladi 3y agofor the digital archaeologists who do ftp excavations: here are the statistics of the collective Dutch university ftp machine(s) http://ftp.surfnet.nl/.statistics/ http://ftp.surfnet.nl/.statistics/
- pluijzer 3y agoThe ever humble Finish /culture/finish folder is, unwarrantedly, empty.
- hnwizard 3y agoThere is another absolute classic from the same era: http://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/ http://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/ It holds an amazing array of DOS era PC utilities. There was also ftp.uu.net which among other things, was used to drop and download files between users for a long time.
- drbw 3y agoBlimey, that's an address I haven't seen in a long time. Happy times downloading Amiga shareware from a university computer lab. And now I feel old...
- amno 3y agohttps://ftp.sunet.se/ https://ftp.sunet.se/ for another oldie one.
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoNow there's a hostname I must have typed several hundred times between '92 and '96. Along with a UK mirror of Sunsite and HENSA Micros, a very visited service. I am guessing my first linux came from nic.funet.fi -- a Slackware with 0.99pl12 -- but it may have been Sunsite.
- LarryMade2 3y agoThis was probably the first website I regularly used when I got internet (late 90s) - because it had an awesome Commodore 8-bit archive. That archive is now hosted on another domain ( http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/ http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/ ) even now it's still an awesome resource for Commodore fans.