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ABSTRACT
Pierre Beyssac, who launched EU.org around 1995 and was the co-founder of Gandi, a French company which profoundly disrupted that country's growing market of domain names, reflects on his path from the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s. He was one of these discreet but central players of the French Web scene of the 1990s and 2000s, who experienced these tremendous times as a user, then as a “pro-am” and finally as a web professional.
Acknowledgment
We would like to warmly thank Pierre Beyssac for his testimony.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Pro-am is a contraction of professional–amateur.
2. This interview is an edited transcription of an interview that was conducted on 20 July 2017, within the FrenchWeb90 project, which was supported by the French National Research Agency. http://web90.hypotheses.org/3840
3. Interviewers are Camille Paloque-Berges, Valérie Schafer and Victoria Peuvrelle.
4. École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, now known as Mines ParisTech.
5. Clermont-Ferrand is a French city in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
6. FNAC is a French retail chain, which is selling cultural and electronic products. In the 1990s it was known for letting users read or test some of its products on the spot.
7. A French Videotex online service launched at the beginning of the 1980s.
8. In the suburb of Paris.
9. CIRCE (Centre Inter-Régional de Calcul Électronique) used to serve as a computing center for many research labs and education structures all over France.
10. The “École Supérieure d'Electricité” is one of France's prestigious Grandes Écoles dedicated to electric energy and information sciences.
11. VMS (Virtual Memory System) is the native operating system of VAX, a DEC machine. Ultrix is DEC's version of UNIX.
12. UNIX-to-UNIX Control Protocol.
13. FNET is the first French provider for UUCP and then Internet (TCP-IP) networks – operating since 1983 by academia-based volunteers in relation with the European organization EUnet. After 1992 it was formalized as a for-profit association. It was then incorporated and bought by a telecom company, Qwest.
14. UUNET is the first international commercial provider for UUCP networks.
15. A city in western France.
16. RENATER (Réseau National deTélécommunications pour la Technologie, l'Enseignement et la Recherche) is both a public interest group and a network born in 1993 for providing networks to the French Research and Education milieu.
17. These three ISPs started their activity quite early in France.
18. A pioneering French ISP funded by Jean-Michel Planche that provided access to private companies.
19. The French Network Information Centre.
20. The ancestor of Afnic.
21. A famous daily newspaper.
22. France-Teaser created the first Minitel servers that allowed connections with Internet.
23. Jon Postel, early contributor of the Internet's RFC standardization documents and TCP-IP protocol, co-founder of the Internet society and administrator of IANA, was a prominent figure, if not a “star” of the Internet pioneer sphere.
24. A famous French trade union, leaning on the far left.
25. On this affair, see the paper by F. Tréguer and P. Petin in this issue. The top model Estelle Halliday filed a complaint against AlternB, the hosting company held by Valentin Lacambre, after a Web user had put naked pictures of her online (these pictures had already been published in a printed magazine and they were then reused by an other people magazine). See http://altern.org/alternb/defense/faq.html
26. Société à responsabilité limitée. This means a “company with limited liability.”
27. Association des utilisateurs d'Internet [Association of Internet users].
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Camille Paloque-Berges
Camille Paloque-Berges holds a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Sciences with a thesis on the cultural history of Internet folklore. She is the author of Poétique des codes sur les réseaux informatiques (2009), Qu'est-ce qu'un forum Internet? Une généalogie historique au prisme des cultures savantes numériques (2018) and co-editor of Histoires et cultures du Libre (2013, with C. Masutti). Today she is a research engineer at the History of Techno-Sciences Lab (HT2S) at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris and associated researcher of the "Trajectoires du numérique" cluster at the Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC, CNRS).
Victoria Peuvrelle
Victoria Peuvrelle was an intern in the Web90 project at ISCC (CNRS) at the time of this interview.
Valérie Schafer
Valérie Schafer is researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (ISCC, CNRS) where she leads the Web90 project dedicated to the history, memory and heritage of the Web of the 90s, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). Her main research interests are the history of the Internet and of the Web, Web archives and Digital Cultures. She will join the C2DH of the University of Luxembourg, starting mid-February 2018 as a Professor of Contemporary European History.