UUNET
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UUNET (standing for UNIX to UNIX Network) is one of the industry's oldest and largest Internet Service Providers.
Prior to its founding, access to Usenet and E-mail exchange from non-ARPANET sites was accomplished using a cooperative network of systems running the UUCP protocol over POTS lines. During the mid-1980s, growth of this network began to put considerable strain on the resources voluntarily provided by the larger UUCP hubs. This prompted Rick Adams, a system administrator at the USGS Center for Seismic Studies, to explore the possibilities of providing these services commercially as a way to reduce the burden on the existing hubs.
With funding in the form of a loan from Usenix, UUNET Communications Services began operation in 1987 as a non-profit corporation providing Usenet feeds, E-mail exchange and access to a large repository of software source code and related information. The venture proved successful and shed its non-profit status within two years. At the same time, the company changed its name to UUNET Technologies. In 1990, UUNET launched its AlterNet service, which provided access to an IP backbone independent of the constraints of those operated by the government. That network lives on in a much larger form and serves as the core of a set of products which include access at dial-up and broadband speeds as well as web hosting.
Today, UUNET is a brand of MCI (formerly WorldCom). The name UUNET has lost much of its luster in the eyes of today's network engineers due to MCI's lax policies toward spam: as of December 2004, Spamhaus (http://www.spamhaus.org/) listed 236 known spam sources under the responsibility of mci.com.
Timeline
- 1987 - UUNET Communications Services is founded and passes its first traffic
- 1989 - UUNET becomes a for-profit corporation
- 1990 - UUNET launches AlterNet
- 1991 - UUNET participates in the founding of the Commercial Internet Exchange Association
- 1995 - The company sells stock on the NASDAQ stock market in an initial public offering that would become part of the beginning of the dot-com boom.
- 1996 - Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) acquires UUNET
- 1997 - WorldCom acquires MFS
- 2000 - The UUNET brand is folded into WorldCom's product line and disappears
- 2003 - The UUNET brand re-emerges as WorldCom's wholesale-only brand
- 2004 - WorldCom renames itself to MCI, still using the UUNET brand for wholesale business.
External links
- UUNET (http://www.uu.net)
- Tim O'Reilly discusses UUNET as an open source-derived business. Includes some history. (http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/05/09/lessons.html)
- Discussions about UUNET spam (http://groups.google.com/groups?scoring=d&q=UUNET+MCI&meta=group%3Dnews.admin.net-abuse.email) in news:news.admin.net-abuse.email.
- Usenet message in comp.org.usenix announcing UUNET creation (Jan 29 1987) (http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.org.usenix/msg/e34a9ea79940cdbb?hl=en)
- Estimated spam Business on UUNET (http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=158)