Even though the early history of the Internet was clearly an American one, Europe also has a story to tell, in particular Peter Kirstein.

In 1968 not only the American Arpanet was built, but also the British "NPL Network” at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) . It was in 1970 when Larry Roberts, the head of US-ARPANET and Donald Davies from the National Physical Laboratory thought about bringing these two networks together in a transcontinental connection. The idea was that the connection should be made using a telephone line, one already in existence between Washington and Kjeller, near Oslo, for collecting seismic data. However, there were problems with that plan.

At this time America was at war in Vietnam, but that wasn't the main problem Peter Kirstein had to cope with in his work. "Europeans don't worry about national things like that. The real problem was that the UK government has just announced it was joining the European community and was trying to get into the common market. That made Europe good and the US bad from a governmental policy standpoint.”

"National considerations have always existed in technical areas” The entrance of the UK into the European Union had the effect that Donald Davies got hooked on other initiatives and so Peter Kirstein from the University College of London (UCL) took over to set the Link between the US and UK. After months of quarrels he finally got the project running when he managed to get the British Post Office to agree to fund the 9.6kbit line to Norway for one year. He was also supported by Donald Davies with a cheque of £5000. "The most he could sign for personally”, Peter Kirstein says. But neither the British Science Research Council nor the Department of Industry were willing to support the project.

The former considered it speculative and uncertain and the latter required industrial interest in order to finance it. Something that wasn't forthcoming at that time. The whole project was still in tricky water. "It seemed that nobody from the British official authorities welcomed this opportunity".

The real disaster was still to come Peter Kirstein had asked ARPA to send over some equipment: a so called "Terminal Interface Processor” (TIP), formerly know as IMP (Interface Message Processor), that was needed to set up the planned "remote ARPANET host". When the parcel worth $68,000 (average value 2011) arrived at Heathrow in July 1973 it was promptly issued a tax bill. "They told Peter Kirstein ‘You owe us £5000’”, Steve Crocker, himself a noted Internet Pioneer said at the Jon Postel award ceremony in Vienna last year. "That was a lot of money at that time. But Peter navigated through these very muddy waters by stating: ‘Ok, no problem. We’ll pay you, but I just want to talk about it a little bit and when we get done talking we’ll see what happens."

It happened that Peter Kirstein was allowed to guarantee the sum with the only money he had: the £5000 from Donald Davies. From there Peter Kirsten moved on quickly: He demonstrated the first transcontinental ARPANET service on the 9.6Kbps line publicly in Brighton in September 1973 and at a major IEE open lecture on November 14.

That was just the beginning "Treasury came down hard two years later", as Steve Crocker remembers those days. "They said to Peter Kirstein with considerable force : 'We have done talking, pay us.'" The project again seemed to be on the brink. But after Peter Kirstein was able to convince the Ministry that the equipment was only of interest to the US Department of Defence and "not to other British ministries, a landmark ruling was made", Peter Kirstein writes in his paper 'Early Experience with the ARPANET and INTERNET in the UK': "The equipment that you have imported, and any future equipment brought in under the same agreement, would be free of duty and VAT".

The importance of that ruling in hindsight was that Peter Kirstein and his team at the University College of London (UCL) could go on with their project "free of most bureaucracy". The special agreement also helped Peter Kirstein to keep others out of the project who wanted to interfere. He just had to tell them of the VAT bill that would be pending if the project moved out of UCL. But it didn't help to keep others away from trying to rewrite history. "As usual, a successful activity had no shortage of parents" Peter Kistein says. Some people even asked the Queen to formally open a link between RSRE Malvern, UK and the US in February 1976, - "though it really was the same link via UCL". It was the work of Peter Kirstein and his team at UCL who made sure that from 1973 until 1985 everyone who had access to the British network also could get access to the US-ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet. In June 2003, Peter Kirstein's work was also finally honoured by the Queen who appointed him "Commander of the British Empire”

2003 - a year of celebrations The IETF, "Internet Engineering Task Force”, had even more to celebrate last year. It was in January 1983, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) had a "flag day," and the Network Control Protocol (NCP) was turned off and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) was turned on. It became pretty clear at the IETF meeting in Vienna, that it is far more complicated today to upgrade from IPv4 to the new Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) than it was 20 years ago.

At this time it was still possible to simply trick the lever. Then, in the 80s nobody thought about doing business over the Internet and not more than 200 servers were plugged in to the network. "Today 100 million computers are connected to the net in 250 countries. (Mark Buchanan, Nexus: small worlds and a groundbreaking theory of networks)

It was also 20 years ago, on June 23, 1983 when the Domain Name System (DNS) was put in place. Paul Mockapetris had the idea of making a logical division of the name and to have a connection between a name such as www.elpais.es and the actual internet address, which is still a number. In these Neolithic days of the internet there was just one man who was in charge of handling the names and numbers: Jon Postel. As a joke, friends also called him the " numbers Czar ", because since the beginning of the ARPANET he was the uncontested administrative authority for Internet addresses: Before the registration of a Domain Name became a business everyone who wanted to connect a new computer to the network or every country, that wanted to introduce a new country code level domain such as 'dot es' or 'dot uk' called Jon Postel in California.

Jon Postel died in 1998. In honour of this very special and handsome man, the Internet Society introduced 1999 the "Jon Postel Award" with consists of not only prestige, but of a kind of glass-fishbowl and a check for 20,000 US Dollars.

some audio quotes from kirstein.