mcvax

mcvax was a historical computer located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, which was the core relay node of the EUnet for many years. The “mc” stood for Mathematisch Centrum, which is now known as the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica. The “vax” part came from the product name of the device: mcvax was an early Vax780 produced by the now defunct Digital Equipment Corporation. Mcvax carried serial number 37.

Initially (inter)national networking was based on the UUCP communication protocol built into every flavor of Unix. Piet Beertema developed and deployed a setup which made use of the star-like topology of EUnet. All backbone sites in Europe maintained the uucp map for their own country, and at night would fully exchange any changes of their national maps with mcvax. mcvax automatically exchanged all of them with the USA, where they would reach the distribution point feeding them into comp.mail.maps newsgroup.

Later, mcvax moved to the TCP/IP (Internet) protocols, and networking started to cover a wild variety of systems.

At first mcvax just used dial-up (with autodialers that were ‘ahead of the law’) and X.25 to various places (North America, Japan, Europe, Korea etc.). Later mcvax got its own leased line to the Center for Seismic Studies in Northern Virginia, colloquially known as ‘Seismo’. In 1984 it was used for a risque April fools joke, called Kremvax.

Mcsun (or relay.eu.net or net.eu.relay in some parts of Europe) replaced the international backbone host of EUnet around 1990. This machine was donated by Sun Microsystems, and owned by the European Unix Systems User Group (EUUG). It was located at just 5 meter from where mcvax used to be, and operated by the same people. To honour its legacy, in its role as interconnect between EUnet and EARN/BITNET mcsun kept the (by then already famous) name ‘MCVAX’.