XLINK originally was the eXterne Lokale Informatik-Netz Karlsruhe (the external connection of the computer science network of the universities in
Karlsruhe, Germany
Karlsruhe ( , , ; South Franconian: ''Kallsruh'') is the third-largest city of the German state (''Land'') of Baden-Württemberg after its capital of Stuttgart and Mannheim, and the 22nd-largest city in the nation, with 308,436 inhabitants. ...
).
It was created in 1984, when it offered one of the first
UUCP
UUCP is an acronym of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers.
A command named is one of the prog ...
connections from Germany to the USA (via
UUNET
UUNET, founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was one of the first commercial Internet service providers. Today, UUNET is an internal brand ...
), and from November 1989 it also offered Internet connectivity mainly to universities in the south of Germany.
XLINK was one of the founding members of
RIPE
Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE, French for "European IP Networks") is a forum open to all parties with an interest in the technical development of the Internet. The RIPE community's objective is to ensure that the administrative and technical coo ...
and of
DENIC
DENIC eG is the manager of the .de domain, the country-code top-level domain for Germany.
It was founded in 1996 and is organised as a non-regulated not-for-profit cooperative. DENIC provides the Domain Name System (DNS) as well as registration ...
; its autonomous system number was AS517.
It was transformed into (part of) a company in 1993, and as such, competed with the UniDO ISP (incorporated as
EUnet
EUnet was a very loose collaboration of individual European UNIX sites in the 1980s that evolved into the fully commercial entity EUnet International Ltd in 1996. It was sold to Qwest in 1998. EUnet played a decisive role in the adoption of TCP/IP ...
Germany) for the title of first commercial Internet service provider in Germany.
It was bought by
Qwest
Qwest Communications International, Inc. was a United States telecommunications carrier. Qwest provided local service in 14 western and midwestern U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dako ...
in 1999 and contributed to and renamed to
KPNQwest
KPNQwest was a telecommunications company equally owned by the Dutch national telecom operator KPN and Qwest Communications International Inc., the Internet communications company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
The company was set to bring ...
Germany in May 2000, which went bankrupt in the
Internet bubble
The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...
crash of 2002. Remnants exist in
KPN
KPN (in full Koninklijke KPN N.V., also Royal KPN N.V.) is a Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company. KPN originated from a government-run postal, telegraph and telephone service and is based in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
History Un ...
Eurorings.
References
{{Reflist
External links
History of XLINK(in German)
Internet in Germany
Internet service providers