From the 1970s, a part of the young community of French computer engineers with a particular interest in American technologies started working to import data network solutions that contrasted with local IT standards. The FNET network, the French local branch of a UUCP protocol-based network infrastructure linking the United States to Europe via the central EUNET node in the Netherlands, was one such solution. This international network of “Unix machines” was among the first, most active and largest to connect the IT R&D communities, and foreshadowed the first Internet connections in Europe. Based on a collective and self-managed organizational model, the unplanned project was deployed through horizontal scientific and industrial associative ties. It cultivated a spirit of independence from institutions, displayed collective representations and imagery of pioneering, but relied, in fact, on public research and telecommunications infrastructures. The history of Unix networks in Europe in the 1980s allows us to re-examine the autonomist utopias celebrated in the history of computer networks, in light of the institutional framework in which they took place.