25 years ago today, the University of Bristol joined the Internet.
Well, that’s the headline – but it’s not entirely accurate. By 1991, the University had been connected to other universities around the UK for a while. JANET had been established in 1984 and by 1991 had gateways to ARPANET so by the “small i” definition of internet we were already on the internet.
These days, when we talk about “the Internet” we’re mostly talking about the global TCP/IP network.
In 1991 JANET launched the JANET IP Service (JIPS) which signalled the changeover from Coloured Book software to TCP/IP within the UK academic network. [1]
On the 8th March 1991, the University of Bristol received it’s allocation of the block of public IPv4 address space which we’re still using today.
What follows is a copy of the confirmation email[2] we received from the branch of the American Department of Defence (NIC) which was responsible at the time for allocating address space, and it describes the Class B network 137.222.0.0 had been assigned to us.
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: 08 March 1991 12:46 -0800
From: HOSTMASTER@mil.ddn.nic
To: RICHARD.HOPKINS@uk.ac.bristol
Cc: hostmaster@mil.ddn.nic
Subject: BRISTOL-NET
Richard,
The new class and network number for BRISTOL-NET is:
Class B, #137.222.0.0
NIC Handle of technical POC is: RH438
The NIC handle is an internal record searching tool. If a new Technical
Point of Contact was registered with this application a new NIC handle
has been assigned. If the Technical POC was already registered at the
NIC but their handle was not provided in the application, it has been
listed here for your reference and for use in all future correspondence
with the NIC.
If you require the registration of any hosts or gateways on this
network in the DoD Internet Host Table maintained by the NIC, send the
names and network addresses of these hosts and gateways to
HOSTMASTER@NIC.DDN.MIL.
PLEASE NOTE: The DoD Internet Host Table has grown quite large and
is approaching the limits of manageability. The NIC strongly
discourages the registration of new hosts in the table except in
cases where interoperability with MILNET is essential.
At most, the NIC is prepared to accept no more than 10 initial
registrations from new networks. We encourage you to register any
new hosts or gateways with the domain name servers that will handle
the information your hosts.
It is suggested that host number zero in any network be reserved (not
used), and the host address of all ones (255 in class C networks) in any
network be used to indicate a broadcast datagram.
The association between addresses used in the particular network
hardware and the Internet addresses may be established and maintained by
any method you select. Use of the address resolution procedure
described in RFC 826 is encouraged.
Thanks again for your cooperation!
Linda Medina
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---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
So happy quarter-of-a-century-of-IPv4 everyone!
[1] Dates taken from Hobbes’ Internet Timeline http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
[2] The sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed the format of the To: address that was in use at that time…