Transition at Merit IE

Sun Dec 5 18:52:58 UTC 1993

Jim:

Since you are a latecomer and obviously do not have all the
information I forgive you  ;)   But I think I should point out:

|About two years ago, Merit called upon Mark Knopper to accept the
|position of manager of the Internet Engineering Group and to oversee
|the transition from the T1 NSFNET to the T3 NSFNET.  Mark stepped up

The planning/transition/design started in about mid-1989, some even
earlier. By the end of 1990 we had cross country T3 connectivity,
almost a year before the two years you mentioned. I will attach a
relevant message. Don't get me wrong, Mark deserves alot of credit (as
does Jordan Becker of ANS, for example), I am just commenting on your
wording.

|Effective today, Elise Gerich will take the lead as Manager of the
|Internet Engineering Group.  As most of you know, Elise has been
|instrumental in the management and operation of the NSFNET since its
|inception.  Elise is looking forward to helping the regional-techs
|group evolve to a broader operational forum and to working with the
|regionals to transition from the current NSFNET architecture to the
|future architecture.  

Elise also deserves alot of credit for her talents that allowed her to
grow into such a (well deserved) position. But, the NSFNET inception
was in about 1985-ish, well before Elise was hired as a Site
Coordinator into the Information Services group at Merit, which
happened shortly after Merit entered into the NSFNET backbone agreement
with NSF towards the end of 1987.

Besides that, great to see that Mark will help U.S. telecom industry
with data communications, I am sure his skills will be very valuable
to them. And also great to see Elise playing such an interesting role,
given all the efforts she has put into the project over the years.

Hans-Werner

---

  From epg at merit.edu Mon Dec 31 15:53:06 1990
  Date: Mon, 31 Dec 90 15:52:39 EST
  From: Elise Gerich <epg at merit.edu>
  Message-Id: <9012312052.AA05719 at merit.edu>
  To: members at farnet.com, partners at merit.edu, regional-techs at merit.edu
  Subject: Introducing Production Traffic on the T3 NSFNET

  December 31, 1990

  The NSFNET partnership has been in the process of building an
  eight node T3 backbone to complement the T1 NSFNET backbone.
  The T3 end nodes which are currently installed are San Diego,
  Urbana-Champaign, Ann Arbor, and Palo Alto.  We already have
  begun to route some traffic between San Diego, Urbana-Champaign,
  and Ann Arbor, and are in the process of phasing in more
  production traffic.

  We are pleased to announce that the installed end nodes,
  constituting half of the initial T3 NSFNET backbone, are
  ready for operational traffic, with the remaining nodes to
  become operational over the coming weeks.

  Happy New Year everyone!

	   The NSFNET Partnership Holiday Crew 