Summary

  • The Institute Jožef Stefan’s X.400 mail service predated Slovenia’s first direct IP Internet connection and was temporarily moved to stronger hardware and a basement with independent power during the 1991 war.
  • The permanent VAX known as Stenar was a later machine. Slovenia’s first IP link, to the Netherlands, followed in late November; neither event turns all earlier email into IP traffic.

In a crisis, continuity can depend on an unglamorous decision: move the equipment, find a safer room and keep the service powered. A retrospective history of Slovenia’s computer networks describes just such a change at the Institute Jožef Stefan (IJS) in 1991. The mail system went from a DEC MicroVAX II to a more powerful VAX, while the service itself moved into a basement and received independent power. The account does not say that the move made the system invulnerable or that it never went offline. It records an effort to keep an existing communications service operating under wartime conditions.

That service was not the same thing as Slovenia’s later direct Internet link. IJS had participated in the Yugoslav academic network SLON, and Slovenian researchers already used X.400 mail and other network services with international connections established in the late 1980s. X.400 was a message-transfer standard in the OSI family. It could carry email across gateways and networks that did not use the Internet Protocol. The distinction matters: the presence of international email did not mean the country already had a direct IP connection to the global Internet.

The machine sequence also needs care. The Computer History Museum Slovenia says the wartime service was temporarily moved onto a more powerful DEC VAX 4000/200, then says the Ministry of Science and Technology soon supplied a permanent main server, a DEC VAX 4000/300 called Stenar. A 2011 first-person account gives more specific dates and slightly different model naming: it describes borrowing a microVAX 4000-200 on 3 July and receiving Stenar on 10 July.

The accounts support a temporary upgrade followed by a separate permanent host; they do not justify collapsing both into one machine or claiming that Stenar itself was the server moved during the fighting.

The institutional chronology explains why this episode belongs beside, but apart from, the Internet’s arrival. Slovenia’s Ten-Day War followed its independence declaration on 25 June 1991 and the Brioni ceasefire arrangements of 7 July. In June, IJS had also secured a public-network X.25 connection toward the European IXI backbone. A direct IP Internet connection through IJS to NIKHEF in the Netherlands was technically established in late November. X.25 transport, X.400 mail and IP connectivity were related parts of a changing network environment, not interchangeable names for one service.

ARNES later recalled that IJS used Stenar to disseminate news during the war and isolation. Other accounts describe local mail lists and gateways, but their surviving message content is a different story. The evidence here supports a narrower conclusion: existing academic infrastructure and the people operating it provided a way to continue exchanging messages, while equipment and location were adapted. It does not establish the number of messages, who received them, how continuously the service ran, or how widely ordinary residents could access it. The museum’s network history and Jerman Blažič’s account of the first Slovenian Internet connection make the protocol and equipment sequence visible without mistaking a functioning mail service for universal Internet access.

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