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mcvax
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mcvax.cwi.nl used to be the international backbone node of
EUnet, the European Unix network. It was located in
Amsterdam, Netherlands and belonged to "Centrum voor Wiskunde
en Informatica" (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science)
which is an institute belonging to a foundation called
"Mathematisch Centrum". Since the first mcvax was on of the
first VAXen in Europe and one of it's first uucp
connections was to a machine called decvax it was quickly
christened mcvax. Some also say this was done to give Jim
McKie a nice mail address: mcvax!mckie. But this is certainly
not true at all. The function of EUnet international backbone
moved to another VAX later but the name moved with it, because
in those days of mainly uucp based mail and before widespread
use of pathalias it was simply not feasible to rename the
machine to "europa" as was suggested at one stage.
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
owned by the European Unix Systems User Group (EUUG). It
was located about 5m from where mcvax used to be and operated
by the same people.