[PLUG-TALK] Rain-net, the internet in Oregon in 1991

[Keith Lofstrom]

In 1991, some of us joined together with Randy Bush, Steve
Neighorn, and Jeff Beadles to form Rain-net, perhaps the
first connection to the internet from Oregon.  The "Research
And Information Network" was mostly a few hundred modems
running SLIP between our homes.  Randy arranged a leased
line connection, shared with The Little Garden network in
San Francisco and a university consortium in then-boycotted
South Africa, to AlterNet in Virginia, one of the first
hubs for the newly emerging internet. 

I helped assemble a lot of the Unix workstations used by
Rainnet "researchers", so they let klic.rain.net (now kl-ic.com)
participate.  I had my own class C, 256 routable IPV4 addresses. 
Heck, there were only a few hundred machines on the whole net,
so we had plenty of IPV4 addresses, thousands of class Cs
available.  Now the world has run out.


I write this because I found a map of RainNet from 1994 in a
pile of papers.  http://keithl.com/rainnet1994.png   This was
back when the Internet was a research network, universities
and DoD only, so we were careful to pretend there weren't a
bunch of tinkering hobbyists behind those top level routing 
machines.  We originally had an informal "network" of machines
doing uucp store-and-forward connections, one email exchange
took hours, sometimes days.  The rearchitecting to TCP/IP
was a pretty big deal.

Some of the local ISPs like aracnet, hevanet, pacifier, and
others grew out of those connections.  There weren't any
commercial ISPs, no cable or fiber internet, it was all
2400 baud modems over the analog telephone network.  Want
more speed?  Pay for more phone lines - at one point I had
4, another fellow had 50. 1.5Mbps T1s were hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year.  

That was the state of the art two decades ago.  Some folks 
talk about building this or that new local network.  Risky!
Draw a dotted line between 1991 and now, and imagine how
different things will be in 2035.  Most likely, new ultra-
low-cost technologies, perhaps very different than TCP/IP,
will be developed to connect the world's "bottom billion"
over the next decade, and spread to the world.  Portland
may still be paying off loans for massive installations
of 2010's technology.  The only thing we can predict about
the future is that we cannot predict it, that it has teeth,
and it bites.

More history at ftp://ftp.psg.com/pub/rain-net/overview .  Randy
Bush, our Fearless Leader, is now working for IETF in Tokyo.
When he lived in Portland, he was a system administrator for a
Swiss bank (with a dedicated frac T1 to Zurich).  His hobby was
connecting countries to the internet - Peru, Indonesia, South 
Africa, etc.  If he ever visits Portland, we MUST have him speak.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993