RELCOM or Relcom (russian: РЕЛКОМ, Релком), an acronym for "RELiable COMmunications" is a

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections ar ...

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...

. It was launched in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

on August 1, 1990 in the

Kurchatov Institute The Kurchatov Institute (russian: Национальный исследовательский центр «Курчатовский Институт», 'National Research Centre "Kurchatov Institute) is Russia's leading research and developmen ...

in collaboration with

DEMOS Demos may refer to: Computing * DEMOS, a Soviet Unix-like operating system * DEMOS (ISP), the first internet service provider in the USSR * Demos Commander, an Orthodox File Manager for Unix-like systems * plural for Demo (computer programming ...

co-operative (although the engineering team at

at the time consisted mostly of Kurchatov Institute employees, some key members ( Mikhail Davidov,

Vadim Antonov Vadim Antonov (russian: Антонов Вадим Геннадьевич) born May 25, 1965 is a Russian-American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is known for his work on operating systems, Internet backbone networks, network router hardw ...

Dmitry Volodin Dmitri (russian: Дми́трий); Church Slavic form: Dimitry or Dimitri (); ancient Russian forms: D'mitriy or Dmitr ( or ) is a male given name common in Orthodox Christian culture, the Russian version of Greek Demetrios (Δημήτρι ...

) in the RELCOM team were never employed by Kurchatov Institute). It became one of the first Russian computer networks (and the first commercial

internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...

in the USSR) and its development led to the emergence of the

Runet Runet (russian: Рунет), a portmanteau of ru (code for both the Russian language and Russia's top-level domain) and net/network, is the Russian-language community on the Internet and websites. The term Runet was coined in Israel in the sp ...

. Initially it was purely

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

network based on the

UUCP UUCP is an acronym of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the ...

protocol. During the

Soviet coup attempt of 1991 The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

the Relcom network was used to spread news about the event worldwide while the coup perpetrators were trying to suppress mass media activity through the KGB.A Computer Network for Democracy and Development
— an August, 1991 report by Larry Press, a

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

professor at

California State University The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 485,550 students with 55,909 faculty and staff, CSU is the largest four-year public univer ...

Now it is managed by Relcom Business Network Ltd., a Russian ISP.

References

External links

Relcom website
Computing in the Soviet Union Soviet inventions Science and technology in Russia Internet service providers of Russia 1990 establishments in the Soviet Union {{russia-stub

See also

References

Further reading

External links