Photograph by Petri Kutvonen, 2011
AT&T 3B2 “uhecs” alias “cs.Helsinki.FI” —
One of the first hosts connected to the Internet in Finland
The U.S. Department of Defence had in January 1987 accepted the national top-level domain name
FI for Finland
along with other top-level domain names
SE,
NL, and
UK.
The Finnish academic network infrastructure
FUNET was prepared and connected to the Nordic
university network
NORDUnet.
The aim was to connect
NORDUnet to the U.S.
NFSnet (National Science Foundation Network) which
was already directly connected to the
ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).
At that time, ARPANET and NFSnet made up the entire Internet.
The domain name
Helsinki.FI was registered on March 30 1987 (i.e. added by hand to the
HOSTS.TXT file which was
distributed to all hosts,
DNS infrastructure existed but was in its infancy).
The Nordic internet worked, but we had to wait until to December the next year until the connection
to the
NSFnet was operational.
On December 1, 1988, at around 19:45 local time (17:45 UTC) first Internet messages crossed the Atlantic Ocean
to NORDUnet over a 56 kbit/s line and at that point of time had Finland, and other countries
connected to the NORDUnet,
joined
the Internet.