MIDnet

» see mid.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Fifty six kilobits per second, shared by eight campuses. That was MIDnet when it came up in September 1987, and it was enough to make it the first of the National Science Foundation's regional backbone networks to run properly end to end. Eight campuses running from Iowa State down to Washington University in St. Louis were strung together on leased telephone lines in a ring, and the ring reached the NSFNET backbone through a single link out of the Nebraska node.

The grant proposals went to the NSF in spring 1986 and funding was approved that summer. Eleven universities across seven states signed on, mostly land grant schools scattered from Arkansas up to South Dakota, in a part of the country with no particular reason to expect it would get there first. AT&T supplied the circuits and the special assembly work made them both late and expensive. By 1989 the NSFNET backbone had moved to T1 and MIDnet's hub sat at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

The network converted to non profit status in 1992 and was bought two years later by Global Internet, a Palo Alto startup, which renamed it Global Internet Network Services. In 1997 Global Internet sold the network services half to Verio and the consulting half to Exodus Communications, and that was the end of MIDnet as something that carried packets. The name is still registered. Today mid.net resolves to a nearly empty page carrying an autonomous system number, which is an odd sort of headstone but a real one.

I was three years old when this ring came up, and I did not get a modem until 1998. Eleven years is a gap no amount of reading closes. What I can hold onto is the number. My first modem at home in Turkey ran at 14.4 kilobits, and MIDnet moved an entire region's research traffic at four times that, split eight ways between universities. Divide it out and each campus had less to work with than a single dial-up line in Ankara. That is what the beginning of this actually looked like.

~ the case file ~

~ what got buried with it ~

The regional layer is the piece of internet history that gets skipped. Everyone knows ARPANET and everyone knows NSFNET, and between the two sat about a dozen regionals doing the unglamorous work of getting universities onto the backbone at all. MIDnet and its peers were the on ramps, and without them the backbone would have been a road connecting five supercomputer centers to each other.

They are also where the commercial internet came from. When the NSF backbone service was retired in 1995 the regionals were the assets that changed hands, because they were the only part of the arrangement that had customers rather than grants. Every consumer ISP of the late nineties is standing on this layer somewhere.

~ what replaced it ~

Global Internet was not a villain in this. It was the ordinary shape of the transition, and the NSF had said from the start that the regionals were supposed to find commercial footing. MIDnet finding it in 1994 was early rather than wrong.

Verio took the network in 1997 and NTT took Verio in 2000, so the first regional network that ever worked is now a line of ownership history filed inside a Japanese telecom. MIDnet, Inc. still exists on paper as a private foundation pointed at research networking. Being first bought it a footnote and a domain name.

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