From en.wikipedia.org:
[A hoax Usenet site at the Kremlin] KREMVAX was originally a fictitious Usenet
site at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of Usenet VAXen with
names of the form _foo_vax. Kremvax was announced on April 1, 1984, in a
posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko.
The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema of CWI (in Amsterdam) as an
April Fool's prank[1]—"because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the
Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time".<ref name="jf" />[2]
Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and kgbvax. The
actual origin of the email was mcvax, one of the first European sites on the
internet.[3]
Six years later, Usenet was joined by demos.su, the first genuine site based
in Moscow. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it were not
just another prank. Vadim Antonov, the senior programmer at Demos and the
major poster from there until mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, and
referred to it frequently in his own postings. Antonov later arranged to have
the domain's gateway site named kremvax.demos.su, turning fiction into truth
and, according to one account, "demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor
transcends cultural barriers".[4]
During the mid-1980s, Usenet users were not aware of the official X.25
computer connections between USSR and other countries. The X.25 connections
had existed since 1980, primarily via VNIIPAS and Academset to Soviet bloc
countries and Austrian hosts at IIASA and IAEA.[5][6] In 1983, the _San
Francisco Moscow Teleport (SFMT)_ venture was created to maintain
USSR-American digital connections via VNIIPAS with its own Usenet analogues
later known as _Sovamnet_ ("Soviet-American net").
In 1992, the company Sun Microsystems, a commercial rival to VAX, gifted an
own-made server to pioneer Soviet commercial network RELCOM. The company
demanded that the server was named _KremlSun_, an allusion to then-legendary
_Kremvax_, and made a root DNS server for the .su domain. The conditions were
met, and the server became one of the initial devices when forming the Moscow
Internet Exchange, since then the largest Russian Internet exchange point.[7]
** See also
- RELCOM
** References
[Reflist]
** External links
- Original message archived on Google Groups (see http://groups.google.com/group/eunet.politics/msg/cf080ae70583a625?hl=en)
- Author's Account (see https://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html)
Category:Computer-related introductions in 1984 Category:1984 in Moscow
Category:April 1984 in Europe Category:Science and technology in Russia
Category:Usenet Category:April Fools' Day Category:Internet in Russia
Category:1984 hoaxes Category:Internet hoaxes Category:Computer humour