Twenty years on: the network that became the Internet

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 28 November 2007 05:51

Business IT - Networking

Celebrations are being held this weekend in Arlington Virginia to commemorate the birth of NSFNet, the first US wide high speed (1.5Mbps) network, modestly billed as "the partnership that changed the world," and which evolved into today's Internet. The specific event being celebrated occurred on 24 November 1987 when the US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a joint proposal from Merit Network, a consortium of Michigan Universities the State of Michigan, IBM and MCI as the winner of its solicitation calling for an upgrade to its existing networ, with private sector participation. This decision, which demanded the development of new technologies and which lead to the creation of single US-wide high speed network was crucial to preparing the way for the evolution to today's Internet. A different approach could have seen haphazard development of multiple networks.

NSFNet started life in 1985 connecting the five NSF university-based supercomputer centres. However its connection with ARPANet immediately put into the major leagues of networking. Significantly NSF decided not to restrict NSFNet to supercomputer researchers but to open it to all academic users. The other wide-area networks (all government-owned) supported mere handfuls of specialised contractors and researchers.

Usage grew rapidly and within a year NSF was planing an upgrade. Steve Wolff, then program director for NSFNet,  recalled later that "[private sector involvement] had to come, because it was obvious that if it didn't come in a coordinated way, it would come in a haphazard way, and the academic community would remain aloof, on the margin. That's the wrong model—multiple networks again, rather than a single Internet. There had to be commercial activity to help support networking, to help build volume on the network. That would get the cost down for everybody, including the academic community, which is what NSF was supposed to be doing."