Now for an individual who co-founded BITNET,
a precursor to the Internet that offered many
of the Internet's core services years
before the commercialization of the Internet itself.
He's of course Ira Fuchs.
(applause)
- Thank you very much.
I'm absolutely delighted to be here on this
the 25th anniversary
of the founding of the Internet Society.
This month also marks the 36th anniversary
of the founding of BITNET.
So, a thank you to the Internet Society for remembering
a bit of Internet history that might otherwise
be overlooked.
Heretofore the most notable recognition
given to BITNET was when the Oxford English dictionary,
the OED, decided that BITNET was a word
and added it to the dictionary.
(laughter)
People have asked me, why did you create BITNET?
Well, the truthful answer is
I was envious of ARPANET users,
they had access to the most exciting technology
at the time.
But ARPANET, as you know,
was only available to a relatively small group of developers
and researchers, and we didn't know
if it would ever be made available to others.
I wanted to find a way
to provide at least some of the core ARPANET services --
email, file transfer, and interactive messaging --
to a much larger group, that included
faculty and students, in all disciplines,
at every college and university in the world.
I needed a path though that didn't require
a lot of new technology to be developed,
and I decided not to seek government support,
so I modeled the network after VNET,
IBM's then corporate network,
that was the largest global network
in the world at the time --
they had over 1200 nodes throughout the planet --
and IBM's global network, corporate network,
utilized IBM's RSCS networking software,
I asked my colleague Grey Freeman at Yale
if he would be willing to connect Yale
to City University of New York, where I was, as a start.
and he liked the idea.
So we connected our institutions with 9600 baud leased lines
and we named the network BITNET,
originally because it's there,
and later, because it's time network.
And then I invited 34 colleges and universities
to join our fledgling enterprise.
Now, since many of those schools, maybe even all of them,
were using IBM mainframes, it meant they already had
what was needed to join, and, as a result,
it grew very quickly.
Within a year or so, we were able to show success
in the United States, which led to IBM
offering to support a European backbone
by connecting City University of New York directly to Rome,
and funding the inter-country links,
leading to the birth of EARN,
the European Academic Research Network.
With IBM's help, and the work of many people
in the countries served, we were able to connect scholars
in most of Western Europe, Japan,
Taiwan, Israel, South America, and we were the first
to connect Russia.
And, at its peak, BITNET had 49 countries connected.
BTNET had other firsts.
BITNET had the first extensive
and highly successful listserv service.
Unfortunately BITNET also had
the first widely disruptive worm.
the Christmas Tree EXEC,
which was launched by a German student in 1987,
and which managed within a very short period, minutes,
to bring down all of BITNET, EARN,
and the IBM corporate network.
(laughter)
BITNET's main legacy was that it gave schools,
I think, the initial motivation to wire their campuses
and begin using electronic communication
to share research and ideas with their colleagues
throughout the world.
And it created, I think,
a set of expectations regarding openness
and accessibility that continue to this day.
In effect, BITNET ended up being an almost decade-long
warm-up act for the Internet,
a fact that there would probably be forgotten
were it not for the Internet Society.
So, thank you very much.
(applause)