Bela Lugosi's Dead, Jim - A brief history of greenend.org.uk

[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]

August 9th, 2005

12:48 am

[Link]

A brief history of greenend.org.uk

After leaving university I spent a year living in a flat on Chesterton Rd. It wasn't great, so when timeplease said he was buying a house and funding it by letting rooms to his friends, and was I interested, I jumped at the chance.

We thought it would be good to have a house domain name. The name came from the fact that the house was on Green End Road:

Subject: Domain names
Date: Fri, 10 May 96 14:35:05 +0100 (BST)

Guys,

Steve and I decided last night that it would be a good thing to have
our own domain name (and /24 network and ... but that's later).  We
provisionally chose the name greenend.org.uk though I don't see why
this should be cast in stone; indeed I think we could do better.

In the end we didn't come up with a better name and I registered the domain through the company I worked for at the time, who did a variety internetish products and services. The delegation came through in June:

Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 16:55:10 +0100
From: Radha Bilimoria <radha@pipex.net>
To: hostmaster@elmail.co.uk
Cc: autofile@pipex.net
Subject: Re: UK Delegation Requests [automatic]

Domain.Register@www.nic.uk wrote:
> 
> Subject: UK Delegation Requests [automatic]
> Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 13:02:56 +0000
> From: Domain.Register@www.nic.uk
> Reply-To: hostmaster@www.nic.uk
> To: hostmaster@pipex.net
> 
> X-Note: These domains have expired on the naming committee.
> 
> ; Greenend
> greenend.org.uk.         NS dns0.elmail.co.uk.
>                          NS dns1.elmail.co.uk.
> 
>     ---------------------------------------------------------------
> reply

The above delegation has been made and the changes will take effect at 
approx 6:00pm today.


Radha (FAOBO HOSTMASTER)

Shortly after I got email to greenend.org.uk working:

From: Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk>
Subject: greenend.org.uk
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 96 17:21:02 +0100 (BST)


OK, greenend.org.uk mail seems to work.  Not polling very often right
now though.

------- start of forwarded message (RFC 934 encapsulation) -------
Received: from post.elmail.co.uk by mojave.elmail.co.uk
	(ElectricMail-MESSAGE-2.0-GAMMA)
	id QAA00787; Wed, 12 Jun 1996 16:55:07 +0100
Received: from sfere.elmail.co.uk by post.elmail.co.uk
	(ElectricMail-MESSAGE-2.0-GAMMA)
	id QAA19645; Wed, 12 Jun 1996 16:52:46 +0100
Received: from post ([193.122.233.1]) by sfere.elmail.co.uk
	 with smtp id <m0uTsEY-0002PCC@sfere.elmail.co.uk>
	(Debian /\oo/\ Smail3.1.29.1 #29.37); Wed, 12 Jun 96 16:53 BST
Received: by ElectricMail-MESSAGE-DGW-GAMMA
Received: by ElectricMail-MESSAGE-DGW-GAMMA
Received: from muskogee.elmail.co.uk by post.elmail.co.uk
	(ElectricMail-MESSAGE-2.0-GAMMA)
	id LAA15377; Wed, 12 Jun 1996 11:09:03 +0100
Received: by muskogee.elmail.co.uk
	id <m0uTmtf-00032vC@muskogee.elmail.co.uk>
	(Debian /\oo/\ Smail3.1.29.1 #29.33); Wed, 12 Jun 96 11:11 BST
Message-Id: <8NLFvi2oM@muskogee.elmail.co.uk>
From: Richard Kettlewell <richard@elmail.co.uk>
To: rjk@greenend.org.uk
Subject: to rjk@greenend.org.uk
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 96 11:11:30 +0100 (BST)


------- end -------

(Yay for Smail spiders in the Received fields!)

Meanwhile my friend Ian was in need of a hostname. Chiark had been around a while by then and had the rather unusual distinction within the University of Cambridge of being a student-run machine with a mail domain, specifically chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk. But when he moved out of college at the end of the September 1996 he was going to lose that name, so I agreed to let him use the name chiark.greenend.org.uk instead. (I've still got the emails but I'm not going to publish them without permission.) Although the details of its connectivity and geography have changed a number of times since then it has always maintained the same name.

At the time of the above my employer didn't sell full internet connectivity, though we did provide it to employees - hence the reference to the /24 above. It was a while before this part of the plan came off though - until the following year we had a single public address and used an RFC1918 network internally. However, ElectricMail were busy turning ourselves into a proper ISP (albeit never a particularly large one), and Greenend became an early user.

From: Richard Kettlewell <richard@elmail.co.uk>
To: greenend@greenend.org.uk
Subject: LAN dialup
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 97 11:54:06 +0000 (GMT)

I'll be testing sfere against LATTIS some time this evening; this will
mean a number of changes.

Your IP address will change to one within 195.224.38.0/28.  Your
default route will be through 195.224.38.1 - i.e. sfere - which will
also run a name sever you can point your resolvers at.  sfere already
has packet forwarding turned on.

Note that the /28 means you want a netmask of 255.255.255.240 for the
local network.  Be sure to get this right.

[...]

If you look in the right place you can still see fossils of this.

In June 1998 we gained a web presence, www.greenend.org.uk. It was hosted on chiark, which would be a return of the favour of a stable name if chiark hadn't long since been far more useful to all of us than the mere cost of a domain name registration.

In October 1998 I moved out of Green End Road, to share a house with Ian, mobbsy and not long after lnr. I maintained ownership of the domain, however, though in early 2001 I left ElectricMail, or NetConnect as it was by then, following a takeover; I see they've renamed themselves since then. The last ever Greenend party was in March 2003, not so long before timeplease sold the place in order to spend more time with his pubs.

These days the Sinister Greenend Organization mainly means the ill-defined social network that extended well beyond a particular household and has now survived its demise.

Now, those who've had contact with the UK Internet may recognize from the dates above that greenend.org.uk was founded before Nominet was created to take over management of .uk domains. And that's why I'm writing this now: Nominet have finally got round to normalizing the status of the domains they inherited from naming committee, and the signed declaration saying greenend.org.uk is mine is in an envelope ready to be posted tomorrow morning.

(Leave a comment)

Comments

From:	jiggery_pokery
Date:	August 9th, 2005 12:07 am (UTC)

(Link)

Hooray! Very cute piece of geek history there.

I stayed at Geoff Hubbard's house once (twice?) if that's a name that has filtered through the Othello division of the SGO at all. It was strangely exciting to travel down Green End Road and be reminded of the SGO. The fact that I know very little about the SGO apart from a vague feeling of well-connected hyper-capable geeks (I suppose it might be thought the Cambridge spiritual equivalent of earth.li...) only makes it more attractive!

(Reply) (Thread)

From:	pne
Date:	August 9th, 2005 10:36 am (UTC)

(Link)

I suppose it might be thought the Cambridge spiritual equivalent of earth.li...

Interesting thought.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	sweh
Date:	August 9th, 2005 01:27 am (UTC)

(Link)

mew.co.uk was previously spuddy.UUCP and I got the mew.co.uk domain name in 1993 or 1994 (when EUnet(GB) would register names for their UUCP customers). Last year Nominet finally normalised my domain and I had to sign the declaration and stuff.

spuddy.mew.co.uk is pretty much just a mail forwaring host for a few people these days, from those who used to use spuddy back when I lived in the UK (free mail and usenet to the UK community from around 1991 to 2001... whee!)

(Reply) (Thread)

From:	gerald_duck
Date:	August 9th, 2005 03:58 pm (UTC)

(Link)

Oooh — spuddy. I remember that!

Meanwhile:

Domain Name:NSICT.ORG Created On:26-May-1993 04:00:00 UTC

Every now and then I get a perverse buzz out of having had an Internet existence longer than, say, bbc.co.uk or amazon.com .

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	sweh
Date:	August 9th, 2005 04:07 pm (UTC)

(Link)

Heh...

mew.co.uk was created 05-Oct-1994 according to Nominet (but had been around for longer as a spuddy.UUCP address)
amazon.com was created on 01-Nov-1994.
bbc.co.uk was created 13-Dec-1994.

Funny!

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	sbp
Date:	August 9th, 2005 10:49 pm (UTC)

(Link)

One of the first domains I registered (or was possibly registered on our behalf by Pipex) when I was working for a startup ISP was fastnet.co.uk, which comes just a few weeks after Amazon.com and before bbc.co.uk. And it's still going as an ISP. I was on the naming list too and went to the first Nominet meeting when Cliff Stanford turned up in his pink Rolls Royce.

Professionally I used to run DNS for win-uk.net at one point, which was registered on 22-Apr-1993. But not until long afterwards.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	(Anonymous)
Date:	August 15th, 2006 02:02 am (UTC)

(Link)

hehe

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	(Anonymous)
Date:	March 28th, 2006 10:10 am (UTC)

Spuddy was my lifeline says "Badger"

(Link)

As an early adopter, with a non-GUI PPC640 and some simple communication software (Mirror) back in the early 90's Spuddy enabled me to receive email and explore its curious but fascinating data structure. My thanks to sweh and anyone else who made this possible; I thought it was an act of selflessness even then. It would be nice if badger@spuddy.mew.co.uk could for old time's sake point to write2us@net4zero.com, but if not then at least anyone who reads this post knows how to make contact. Badger

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	sweh
Date:	March 28th, 2006 02:04 pm (UTC)

Re: Spuddy was my lifeline says "Badger"

(Link)

Mail forwarding done.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	kjaneway
Date:	August 9th, 2005 07:39 am (UTC)

(Link)

Aah... Thanks for that.

Thes SGO make much more sense, now. :-)

(Reply) (Thread)

From:	senji
Date:	August 9th, 2005 08:49 am (UTC)

(Link)

Oh, dear, something must be going wrong then…

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:	pne
Date:	August 9th, 2005 10:36 am (UTC)

(Link)

Fascinating; thanks for writing that up!

(Reply) (Thread)

I deny everything