decvax

As Usenet spread out of North Carolina in the early 1980s it needed machines willing to call lots of other machines and eat the phone bill. Digital Equipment Corporation's Unix group had one, and it was called, plainly, decvax. DEC had its own reasons for wanting the Unix world to hang together on its hardware, and the machine ended up shuttling news and mail between universities and companies across the US.

The name is all over the bang paths of the era, often next to ihnp4: addresses like ...!decvax!host!user were routine for anyone sending mail. Like the other hubs, it made itself redundant once domain names and direct IP routing took over towards the end of the decade.