By '73? My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway, and only NORSAR and maybe one other location. NORSAR only because it was a critically important seismic array used by NATO to monitor Soviet missile tests.

As far as I can tell, Finland first got ARPANET connection via NORDunet in 1988 [1][2][3], though possibly indirectly a few years before as there was a connection to Sweden a few years earlier.

[1] https://siy.fi/history-of-the-finnish-internet/

[2] https://csc.fi/en/news/funets-anniversary-40-years-of-action...

[3] From [2]: "On Thursday December 1st, 1988, the first routing test was carried out, allowing IP packets to pass from Finland via Nordunet to the USA, in effect the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and Arpanet networks. This connected Finland to the international Internet via the Funet network. The following message can be seen as the beginning of the Finnish Internet."

> My understanding is the only other country outside the US to have a connection at that point was Norway

I speak enough Norwegian to have gone around a few museums that tourists and other foreigners don't usually visit, and this is my understanding too.

That sounds about right. I was working at the NSF in the late 80s, around when they were uniting all the scattered mini nets into Teh Interwebz, and I was trading emails with Finns. And BTW I was not trying to compete.