NSF Net

Network architecture of the first NSFNET

Acronym for National Science Ffoundation's Network. The NSFNET began with a series of networks dedicated to the communication of research and education. It was created by the United States government (through the National Science Foundation), and was replaced ARPANET as Internet backbone. It has since been superseded by commercial networks.

History

Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a service network for academic departments, and in 1981 the National Science Foundation (NSF) took notice of it to create an academic network for NSF supercomputers. This network was established in 1985 with the following five nodes:

• John von Neumann Center at Princeton University
• San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign
• Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) between Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh University, and Westinghouse University

NSFNET was a general-purpose network to connect the aforementioned supercomputers as well as regional networks and campuses using the existing TCP/IP in 1986, developed and tested on the ARPANET. In the implementation, PDP-11/73 computers were used as routers which were called "Fuzzballs" under the supervision of Ed Krol of the University of Illinois. The maximum backbone speed was 56 kb/s

Technical support was provided by BBN Technologies' NSF Network Service Center (NNSC) which published the "Internet Manager's Phonebook" with information for each domain and IP address in 1990. Krol created the Hitchhiker Guide to The Internet as one of the first manuals dedicated to the use of the network. As the network grew, the 56 kb/s were exceeded, in June 1987 NSF began the necessary processes to improve NSFNET.

In November 1987 NSF commissioned the Merit Network, a consortium of Michigan public universities, to upgrade the original 56 kb/s network to 13 1.5 Mb/s (T-1) nodes in July 1988. The nodes used nine IBM RT systems running AOS software, a modified version of Berkeley UNIX, as routers