Twenty years on: the network that became the Internet

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 28 November 2007 05:51

Business IT - Networking

However the building blocks of such a network barely existed in 1987. According to an official history of NSFNet "In addition to the communications protocols, appropriate hardware and software had to be specified, which was difficult at the time because there were few, if any, off-the-shelf TCP/IP products available. The fastest routers available at the time switched fewer than 1,000 packets per second."

The partners in the winning consortium had definite ideas about how to respond to the NSF solicitation, according to an official history, "making all of the pieces fit properly into a cohesive, integrated design for a backbone network service required them to break new conceptual ground.

There were three main components of the basic architecture in the proposal: the packet-switching nodes, called the Nodal Switching Subsystem, the circuit switches interconnecting these nodes, called the Wide Area Communications Subsystem, and a network management system. In addition to overall engineering, management, and operation of the project, Merit Network would be responsible for developing user support and information services. IBM would provide the hardware and software for the packet-switching network and network management, while MCI would provide the transmission circuits for the NSFNet backbone, including reduced tariffs for that service."

Yakov Rekhter at the time a member of the IBM team, and now a Juniper Networks Fellow, was responsible for the design and implementation of routing protocols for the NSFNet backbone, which, among other things, led to the development-and first deployment-of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which continues to be the sole inter-domain routing protocol used on the Internet.

The project was much more than a technical challenge. At the IBM senior executive level, persuasion was the order of the day. Bob Mazza, who led the NSFNet project for IBM, found himself on the phone with vacationing executives, selling them on the proposal. "We were in a period of major changes and cost-cutting, so it was a particularly tough time to get an agreement," he recalls. And in the midst of this, one month before the project was awarded, came the great stockmarket crash of October 1987.