>...
> It was actually a Dutchman who made the first international
> connection on November 17, 1988 that enabled the start of the
> world wide web...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Beertema
>
> Met vriendelijke groet, Huub.
Independent of Piet's accomplishments (and they have been
considerable), that Wikipedia article is just nonsense.
Yup, it is. Piet is likely the first one say so.
As others have pointed out, the first international connections
were to the UK and Norway, not The Netherlands. The ccTLD
system was established at the "request" of the UK and the US and
UK ccTLDs were the first ones delegated. Without digging
through old records, I don't remember who was third, but NO is a
more likely candidate than NL.
There was actually an Arpanet (or Milnet?) link to the NL as well,
via TNO-FELS (if I remember correctly although it was not supposed
to be known). I remember myself occasionally dialing into the the
UCL IMP (or whatever it was).
What is significant about that day is that the CWI got connected
to the NSF net. The NSF net accepted the packets (and routes) from
CWI and since CWI was a central hub for lots of (uucp based) European
networks. Also for other networks directly connected to the CWI
with TCP/IP links this was a boost with some small restrictions.
CWI was permitted to connect to Internet but not allowed to be
connected "to any Eastern Block country in any way". Tja...
I really wish that we could somehow restore the spirit of a
collaborative effort, one with many cooperating contributors to
overall network effects rather than seeing people (or their
admirers) scrambling to claim to be first at some important
components of the network. If the network and associated
technologies had not been rather well developed by the time the
web came along, it probably would have failed to get traction,
just as prior efforts that were not intrinsically less developed
did. That doesn't make the web contributions and timing less
important, but our perspective should be broader. In that same
light, I hope there is an appropriate commemoration in a bit
over a year of the publication of "As We May Think" paper and
wish we had done a better job of commemorating the first
appearances of the "Intergalactic Computer Network" and
"Contacts and Influence" ones.
One might read Piet's own trip along memory lane at <www.godfatherof.nl>.
At the occasion of Piet's retirement in 2004 Rick Adams gave a talk
with as tittle "Trans-Atlantic Computer Networking BW (Before Web)"
<http://www.godfatherof.nl/media/rick-presnt.pdf> which an interesting
read as well.
jaap