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An Internet pioneer in HyLeC!

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Hans Decker und Daniel Karrenberg vor den 3D-Druckern im HyLeC © Charline Fuchs​/​TU Dortmund

Did you know that a project at the University of Dortmund had a decisive influence on the development of the Internet and the digital landscape?

This project is the nucleus of the German Internet!

At the university there was the "Informatik Rechner Betriebsgruppe" - IRB. In 1983, this group installed the first German backbone for data exchange in the European Unix Network (EUnet). From 1985 on, this developed into an official third-party funded project due to great demand from research and industry. In addition, the EUnet connected the German networks with other European networks and in turn created a connection to US networks.

From 1988 until the end of 1992, all domain names ending in ".de" were administered by a working group of the IRB.

-> "uni-dortmund.de" is one of the first six ".de" domains to be registered in the IANA database!

In 1993, the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Germany, EUnet Deutschland GmbH, was founded in the Technology Center Dortmund.

While researchers, software developers, engineers and students were the typical users at first, the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s transformed the Internet into a mass medium.

Daniel Karrenberg is one of the Internet pioneers of the EUnet and DE-NIC projects at the University of Dortmund. Together with his colleagues, he networked the UNIX systems available at the IRB and founded the German UNIX User Group (GUUG) with other players.

In 2001, he was the second person ever to receive the Jon Postel Award, probably the highest honor for the builders of the Internet. He was the first of only three Germans to date to be inducted into the "Internet Hall of Fame".

To ensure that all this is not forgotten, the Alumni of Informatik Dortmund e.V. - Association of Alumni and Friends of the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dortmund University is now creating the "German Internet Museum " online. https://www.deutschesinternetmuseum.de/

Here you can discover the history of the German Internet with the help of contemporary witnesses and digital tours in the former rooms of the IRB of the TU Dortmund.

And this is where the body scanner comes in. Daniel Karrenberg visited us together with Hans Decker in the HyLeC and had an avatar of himself created. This will be used on the homepage at the appropriate place and brought to life!

Already in September we were allowed to virtualize another pioneer, Rüdiger Volk. He administered the ".de" domains for 6 years, before this moved to Karlsruhe and then DENIC e.G. was founded in Frankfurt. Today DENIC is still responsible for the allocation of the ".de" domains. Interesting: The ".de" domain with more than 17.5 million registrations is almost as big as ".cn" for China with just over 18 million registrations.

 

If you want to learn more about Daniel Karrenberg, the IRB and the beginnings of the Internet, check out the YouTube channel of Alumni Informatik Dortmund:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dPwDzDZnTc