And didn't some ugly peering battles between 701 and 3561 back when 3561 was MCI cause some { severely hampered | loss of } connectivity between the two?
When AS3561 started (registered in 1994, turned on in 1995), it started with many of the old NSF regionals attached to it. This included what would become AS1. So, I'm fairly sure that AS701 didn't have anything against peering with AS3561. It may be that you are remembering miserable performance. mae-east had to mature in a hurry, mae-west, pennsauken, chicago were just getting started. The CIX SMDS was used in 1995. I don't know when the expression "SMDS = switching makes data slow" started being used (possibly started out east with PSI <--> UUnet) but it is certainly true that the first gen cisco smds and atm cards were miserable under load. IIRC, AS701 and AS3561 had the earliest and richest set of private interconnects. Of course, "earliest and richest" is fairly vague :-) -mark