there were several occasions where europe at least tried to be different. codename bison tells about it, but it is just one piece to the puzzle. another one is the story around dns, where an european version has been in place for a while.

in '83 the domain name system (dns) got implemented commercially the first time. the only country in europe that didn't follow the american way for some years was britain. a historical fact, that somehow seems strange these days. peter kirstein comments that the other european scientists were interested in the research project, but never understood it as a longterm service ...

kirstein16 (audio/x-mpeg, 384 KB)

what the british used those days was called network registration scheme,

dns15 (audio/x-mpeg, 567 KB)

even when they finally implemented dns, they thought the american did it wrong and they decided to do it the other way around. instead of www.cs.ucl.ac.uk they used uk.ac.ucl.cs. they kept this method in place until ex-czechoslovakia joined the internet, peter kirstein says. (officially that took place in february 1992)

kirstein17 (audio/x-mpeg, 723 KB)

and - like kirstein likes to say: "as it so often happens" things start to repeat themselves: once peter kirstein had to translate names back and forth, now the developer of enum have to do the same thing for mapping telefon numbers into the dns to support seamless integration of voice over ip with the telephone network.

another snipped to the yankee-european style debate