The History of the EARN Network

This site is dedicated to EARN, the European Academic & Research Network. We will collect here all the information and documents about EARN that we will be able to find. We have decided to set up this page when we realized, browsing on the Internet, that there is very little (close to nothing) material about EARN available online and it is a shame, as EARN played a pivotal role in the development of  computer networking and the Internet in Europe and beyond for over a decade, between 1983 and 1994.

EARN, together with Bitnet, the US peer network, in fact provided a service including email and file transfer to several thousand Universities and Research Institutions in 50 countries in a period where the Internet was only embryonic in Europe. In the later years traffic was about 10 billion records per year, corresponding to perhaps 500 million emails. These numbers are minuscule compared to the Internet today, but at the time the EARN services made a significant assistance to international scientific cooperation.