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#13: Kremvax
1984: A message distributed to the members of Usenet (the online messaging community that was one of the first forms the internet took) announced that the Soviet Union was joining Usenet. This generated enormous excitement, since most Usenet members had assumed that cold war security concerns would prevent such a link-up. The message purported to come from Konstantin Chernenko (from the address chernenko@kremvax.UUCP) who explained that the Soviet Union wanted to join the network in order to "have a means of having an open discussion forum with the American and European people." The message created a flood of responses. Two weeks later its true author, a European man named Piet Beertema, revealed it was a hoax. This is believed to be the first hoax on the internet. Six years later, when Moscow really did link up to the internet, it adopted the domain name 'kremvax' in honor of the hoax.
Comments
Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.
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Not funny, but definately Very Cool!
Posted by Jennifer on Thu Apr 01, 2004 at 09:37 AM
The nice thing of this April Fool's is that you can still look it up in Google groups:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&threadm=0001%40kremvax.UUCP&rnum=22&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dchernenko%2540kremvax.UUCP%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26c2coff%3D1%26scoring%3Dd%26start%3D30%26sa%3DN
Posted by Berend on Thu Apr 01, 2004 at 01:44 PM
Read more, from and about Piet:
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~piet/
http://www.beertema.nl/
http://www.beertema.nl/Piet_Beertema.pdf
Posted by Ruud H.G. van Tol in Amsterdam - NL on Tue Sep 21, 2004 at 12:59 PM
More information about this can be found at
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/K/kremvax.html.
Posted by Lukas Mai on Sat Apr 02, 2005 at 03:46 PM
I believe the company that connected the Soviet Union to the Internet was SovAm Teleport which received technical services from Mark Graham.
A year later when there was an attempted coup in the Soviety Union, one of the only sources of news going into the Soviet Union was that e-mail link.
That was one of the first 'high profile' moments for the Internet in the pre-hype
days.
Posted by Ken on Sat Apr 02, 2005 at 06:39 PM
Does this have anything to do with the prank version 4.2bsd, Bolshevik Siberian Distribution?
Posted by Kaleberg on Thu Mar 29, 2007 at 05:11 PM
as mentioned in the hacker's dictionary link above, a hilarious coda to the joke is that once there actually was a machine called kremvax, no one believed it.
Posted by akb427 on Sat Jan 05, 2008 at 02:13 AM
Classic, not really funny till the end though.
Posted by Matt on Tue Apr 01, 2008 at 08:07 PM
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