nsfnet

When I got started, the NSFnet backbone was a bunch of IBM RS/6000 systems with comms cards.

I was on the Internet back when the NSFnet AUP banning commercial use was in effect in the early 1990s.

Fortunately I was at UMich in the gcc 1.x time, and we had NSFnet.

I didn't get to know X29 or nsfnet as well as you, at the time networking skills were tantamount to witchcraft voodoo.

I do have a couple questions though - who is in charge of the original NSFnet exchange points, and do they have this authority?

MUDs, stuff like XTrek, and the general requirement that things be non-commercial (to fit within NSFnet guidelines) was really different from the small-computer marketplace happening at the same time.

Last note - I realised recently that I still know the X29 address for nsfnet relay from Janet to the Internet (basically a Janet-to-telnet relay).

There was an awkward bit in the middle where I was super keen to be on the internet (though my main interest was Usenet) and the nsfnet relay via PAD on the Vax was the only available intermediary.

The proposed solution is at the bottom of the article (which is why everyone seems to have ignored it): > The solution to this problem is simple: peering at the original NSFnet exchange points should be forever free and if one participant starts to consistently clip data and doesn’t do anything about it, they should be thrown out of the exchange point.

(And in areas where they have competition, there's an incentive to upgrade before the competitors, to avoid losing customers; while there isn't such competition in every locale, there are enough locales with more than one ISP choice to make those customers painful to lose.) But what does any of that have to do with mandated peering requirements at the NSFnet exchanges?