Well, close, but no cigar... ;^)
Allow me a very brief correction here. Merit is a non-profit organization
located in Michigan (I think the IRS term is 501c or something like that).
We are "owned" (were created) by all the major four-year universities (13)
in Michigan. We also have some 130+ "affiliates" (some people call these
customers) which include community colleges, libraries, commercial firms
and K12 institutions. We are installing authentication for dial-in service
for the entire State of Michigan (using RADIUS) which will eventually mean
that every local dialing exchange in the state will be a local phone call
away from the Internet. The K12 stuff alone brings in over 800 new realms.
Merit (along with the NSF, MCI, IBM and several other TLAs) are the people
who brought you the Internet as you know it today (can you say "NSFNET"?) ;^)
I'm proud to be part of Merit (can you tell? :-) so I wanted to correct any
mis-conceptions (or pre-conceptions) -- but we are not a university per se.
Thank you, and we now return you to your regularly scheduled mailing list...
Regards,
web...
-- William Bulley, N8NXN Senior Systems Research Programmer Merit Network Inc. Domain: web@merit.edu 4251 Plymouth Road MaBell: (313) 764-9993 Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105-2785 Fax: (313) 747-3185