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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 ini
by vidarh 2y ago
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.
- llm_trw 2y agoFascinating, do you think this is the reason why Linux started there?
- vidarh 2y agoI mean, it can't have hurt, but Linus started programming long before he started university, and I assume he had no access before he started so odds are he had the interest already. It might have eased access to some material he needed, but you slower connections weren't a huge limitation back then either.
- mrmlz 2y agoI've never heard of NORDUnet - but googling it seems to be the international facing part of the more (in Sweden at least) famous SUNET! https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunet https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunet https://internetmuseum.se/tidslinjen/nordunet-connects-the-nordic-countries-and-give-us-an-advantage/ https://internetmuseum.se/tidslinjen/nordunet-connects-the-n...
- vidarh 2y agoWell, not just SUNET. It includes SUNET (Sweden), UNINETT (Norway), FUNET (Finland), Forskingsnettet (Denmark) and RHnet (Iceland), and was how the Nordic networks arranged internet access - before NORDUnet only Norway had internet/Arpanet access (largely due to NATO - the NORSAR connection from the early 70's was because the seismic array was a way of keeping track of Soviet missile tests), and only to a few institutions.