Summary

  • In October 1991, a Norwegian-supported satellite route linked the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in Vilnius with the University of Oslo. The route used X.25; early email used X.400. Its international reach did not mean every Lithuanian institution already had TCP/IP.
  • A 64-kbps X.25 line joined Vilnius and Kaunas in 1992. LITNET’s chronology dates its first TCP/IP lines to 1993, while other retrospective accounts call 1994 the point when TCP/IP and wider Internet service were introduced.
  • The transition was layered: a foreign path, domestic circuits, messaging, IP routing and operating finance each had to work. “Connected” can describe different points in that sequence.

A route across a border was not yet a common protocol

In October 1991, a satellite dish and an X.25 link gave Lithuania’s research community a route to Norway. LITNET’s institutional history places the connection between the University of Oslo and the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (MII) in Vilnius. The same account says the network began operating that month and that the first email users were registered in autumn. Its brief chronology is important: it names a functioning link and users, but does not describe a nationwide IP network.

The capacity figures require care. A University of Vilnius anniversary account says the satellite channel had a nominal 64 kilobits per second, with a 9.6-kbps share allocated to digital data; the remaining channel capacity also supported telephone, fax and telegraph traffic. That is not an Internet speed available to each user. The same account recalls that sending an early black-and-white photograph from Oslo to MII in January 1992 took more than two hours. Because the account does not give the image size or a measured transfer log, the anecdote conveys the practical difficulty of moving a large file, not a benchmark.

The network also joined different technical layers. LITNET’s history says Norway supplied X.25 networking equipment and X.400 email equipment. X.25 provided a packet-switched way to move information over the available circuit; X.400 provided a formal messaging service. The combination could carry useful communication without every connected machine speaking TCP/IP. Retrospective sources sometimes call the 1991 route an Internet connection, while other histories reserve “Internet” for later IP-based operation. Both descriptions point to real milestones, but they answer different questions.

Building a Lithuanian network inside the international one

In April 1992, a 64-kbps intercity X.25 circuit connected Vilnius and Kaunas. LITNET’s history names MII, Vilnius University and Kaunas University of Technology as the three institutions connected through X.25. The line was a domestic coordination problem as much as a technical one: an international route to Oslo could not by itself link research computers in two Lithuanian cities.

Norwegian assistance included computers and networking equipment. The record attributes implementation to Lithuanian engineers and institutional teams as well as partners abroad. A later recollection by former LITNET control-centre head Rimantas Kavaliūnas says engineer Zenonas Bedalis demonstrated that Soviet-era telecommunications lines could carry digital data. This is a participant’s memory, not an independent test report, but it helps explain why the network’s domestic path mattered: some of the transition depended on making existing lines usable rather than waiting for a wholly new physical network.

Email, too, had its own sequence. The original MII equipment included X.400 capability; Vilnius University’s X.400 mail server is dated to September 1992 in the LITNET history. This should not be collapsed into a claim that the entire country then had public email or Internet access. The documented users and institutions belonged to research, education and public bodies. The service was institutional and uneven.

The .lt domain began in June 1992 with help from Norway and the University of Oslo. Early second-level names included mii.lt, ktu.lt and vu.lt. Naming was another piece of the network, but a country-code domain was not a substitute for a route, a mail service or an IP connection. In 1994, administration of .lt moved from Oslo University to Kaunas University of Technology, according to the registry’s retrospective. That transfer and the protocol transition occurred in the same broad period, but they were separate operational decisions.

TCP/IP arrived in stages

The dates for TCP/IP are not perfectly aligned across the surviving retrospective record. LITNET’s ten-year history says the first TCP/IP lines were installed in 1993 and dates a 64-kbps Vilnius–Kaunas TCP/IP channel to autumn that year. It also records initial IP number registration and AS2847. The Lithuanian Encyclopedia and a later account based on former LITNET leadership describe the network as ready in 1993 but say TCP/IP was introduced or implemented in 1994. LITNET’s timeline similarly places the first TCP/IP lines in 1993, then dates its international Internet service and management-centre development to 1994.

A cautious reading is that testing, a first line, routable institutional service and a network-wide transition were not necessarily one event. A 2001 anniversary history says the transition from X.25 to TCP/IP began in late 1993 and continued into early 1994. From March 1994, LITNET’s history places international traffic on a Vilnius–Oslo satellite route, through Norway’s UNINETT to NORDUnet’s Stockholm node, at 64 kbps. It says Oslo University paid the operating cost. The route’s architecture and financial support mattered alongside the protocol installed at its endpoints.

The record therefore supports neither a clean “no Internet until 1994” story nor the claim that an October 1991 satellite route instantly made every later Internet service available. X.25 and X.400 were functioning infrastructure. TCP/IP later widened what the network could interoperate with and how institutions could use it. “The first connection” is a milestone; it is not a complete description of the system that followed.

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