NORDUnet

Stockholm to New Jersey

Late in 1988 NORDUnet obtained working Internet routing over a satellite circuit between its Stockholm hub and the John von Neumann Center in Princeton, New Jersey. The circuit ran at 56 kbit/s and connected the Nordic research network to NSFNET, then a principal Internet backbone.

That gave university users across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden general Internet access, rather than access restricted to a particular research project. Juha Heinänen and Mats Brunell drove the Nordic side; Lawrence Landweber and Steve Wolff helped secure the US endpoint and NSF approval.

No one can agree on the day

NORDUnet's own history says the circuit was available in August, was supposed to enter testing on 15 October, remained non-functional in early November, and acquired Internet routing shortly after the Morris worm incident.

A Finnish FUNET participant dates the first traffic to 1 December at about 19:45 Finnish time; another historical study labels the link August 1988. Because the sources are dating different things — availability, testing, routed traffic — the year is the safest date to record.

What “first” can honestly mean here

This was not the first transatlantic Internet-protocol connection: NORDUnet's history mentions earlier project-restricted SATNET links involving Norway and Britain, and France's INRIA and the Netherlands' CWI also established NSFNET connections in 1988.

It was also a satellite circuit, not the new TAT-8 fibre-optic cable, and the US endpoint was the JVNC supercomputer centre rather than Princeton University.

The defensible distinction is narrower: NORDUnet was an early general-purpose international research network offering open access to university users. The circuit was later upgraded to 64 kbit/s in August 1990.