- This is
a time of 20-year anniversaries.
- GARR has
just celebrated the first twenty years of the Italian university and research
network, but there have already been many other anniversaries. The High
Energy Physics community was already well consolidated, with scientific
collaboration at global level to regulate the first international network
for research - HEPnet, set up in the early 80s.
- But since
other research institutes also asked to be hosted on HEPnet, we had to
establish the CCIRN (Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research
Networking), the associations of the European research networks RARE and
EARN.
- The INFN-CNAF,
together with other similar worldwide research institutes, was content
in this peaceful world when some people (e.g. Joy Marino in Italy, Frode
Greisen in Europe) began to say that this was not enough, and that the
network must be extended to other classes of users and that we should quit
the American monopoly system for assignment of IP addresses.
- So it
was that RIPE was set up for management of IP Addresses in Europe. We began
with IUNET and EUNET, parallel networks to the worldwide system of research
networks with few points of contact between Europe and the rest of the
world.
- But when
the web explosion arrived there was no longer any way we could do without
international co-ordination of the network. CNR-CNUCE, which had a much
broader vision of the "network for
all" concept than INFN-CNAF, immediately
endorsed the proposals to create the Internet Society and INFN-CNAF could
only accept the urgent and persuasive invitation from Stefano Trumpy and
therefore it too was among the first founders of the Internet Society.
- A decision
that now the INFN can look back on with pride.
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