Chernobyl's first internet server, after the disaster, ran on FreeBSD

blackbird9

blackbird9

What happened in Chernobyl is a long-standing interest of mine; I saw all the original news reports when it happened, and we had warnings where I lived at the time not to drink the milk because the radioactive cloud was over the country and it had been raining. I found this video, about the first internet server to be set up in Chernobyl (actualy, Pripyat) following the disaster. Of course, this was still in the early days of the internet. He mentions from around 8:00 in the video that the first internet node was created at the end of 1996, consisting of a few FreeBSD servers; he says the website stayed online until 2015. This was the first public internet node created for Chernobyl, and the servers were actually sited in the centre of Pripyat, in the middle of the exclusion zone. At the time this was an important scientific infrastructure, as international efforts were made to monitor, understand and control the disaster. Quite interesting, and a reminder of how things used to be. It's good to know that FreeBSD played an important role, clearly they needed something that worked reliably. It's also pretty good to be typing this on another FreeBSD machine, 30 years later! :)
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZKw2H6d1SU&list=PLxAcrYn0Q03-EeVhdN3_OuTiXbO8p0MjB
screenshot_2026-08-04_at_18:20:20.jpg



screenshot_2026-08-04_at_18:38:53.jpg
 
In the 90-s almost all early Internet infrastructure in Ukraine was running on FreeBSD (2.2.x) servers and Cisco routers.
Exceptions were very rare.
I started as an intern at a small ISP in 1997 and many of our customers didn't even use Internet yet.
They just had email and newsgroups periodically transported using UUCP over modems over telephone lines.
But by 2000 almost everyone was using TCP/IP.
 
Andriy said:
In the 90-s almost all early Internet infrastructure in Ukraine was running on FreeBSD (2.2.x) servers and Cisco routers.
Exceptions were very rare.
I started as an intern at a small ISP in 1997 and many of our customers didn't even use Internet yet.
They just had email and newsgroups periodically transported using UUCP over modems over telephone lines.
But by 2000 almost everyone was using TCP/IP.
Click to expand...
Was there any special reason for this choice?
 
the uucp setup was popular here too in the win95 days.
everybody had a program called dmail that uucp copied the email from the isp and pop3 distributed it to lan clients.it also had its own smtp server
dmail worked on win31 too. win31 had no ppp support (3.11 had tcpip though but no ppp)
later came tcpip and some windows fetchmail clone became popular and uucp was gone.
 
DerTeufel said:
Was there any special reason for this choice?
Click to expand...
uucp for mail and usenet only requires that you shirtly connect to the server a couple of times a day.

With metered telephone lines that is a lot cheaper than permanent or on-demand dialup.

I use uucp to this day (although over TCP).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top