mcvax.cwi.nl used to be the international backbone node of

EUnet, the European Unix network. It was located in

Amsterdam, Netherlands and belonged to "Centrum voor Wiskunde

en Informatica" (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science)

which is an institute belonging to a foundation called

"Mathematisch Centrum". Since the first mcvax was on of the

first VAXen in Europe and one of it's first uucp

connections was to a machine called decvax it was quickly

christened mcvax. Some also say this was done to give Jim

McKie a nice mail address: mcvax!mckie. But this is certainly

not true at all. The function of EUnet international backbone

moved to another VAX later but the name moved with it, because

in those days of mainly uucp based mail and before widespread

use of pathalias it was simply not feasible to rename the

machine to "europa" as was suggested at one stage.