How the Internet Came to Be - Page 9

The Internet takes off

By the mid-1980s there was a significant market for Internet-based products. In the 1990s we started to see commercial services showing up, a direct consequence of the NSFNet initiative, which started in 1986 as a 56 Kbps network based on LSI-11s with software developed by David Mills, who was at the University of Delaware. Mills called his NSFNet nodes "Fuzzballs."

The NSFNet, which was originally designed to hook supercomputers together, was quickly outstripped by demand and was overhauled for T1. IBM, Merit, and MCI did this, with IBM developing the router software. Len Bozack was the Stanford student who started Cisco Systems. His first client: Hewlett-Packard. Meanwhile Proteon had gotten started, and a number of other routing vendors had emerged. Despite having built the first gateways (now called routers), BBN didn't believe there was a market for routers, so they didn't go into competition with Wellfleet, ACC, Bridge, 3COM, Cisco, and others. The exponential growth of the Internet began in 1986 with the NSFNet. When the NCP to TCP transition occurred in 1983 there were only a couple of hundred computers on the network. As of January 1993 there are over 1.3 million computers in the system. There were only a handful of networks back in 1983; now there are over 10,000.

In 1988 I made a conscious decision to pursue connection of the Internet to commercial electronic mail carriers. It wasn't clear that this would be acceptable from the standpoint of federal policy, but I thought that it was important to begin exploring the question. By 1990, an experimental mail relay was running at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) linking MCI Mail with the Internet. In the intervening two years, most commercial email carriers in the U.S. are linked to Internet and many others around the world are following suit.

In this same time period, commercial Internet service providers emerged from the collection of intermediate-level networks inspired and sponsored by the National Science Foundation as part of its NSFNet initiatives. Performance Systems International (PSI) was one of the first, spinning off from NYSERNet. UUNET Technologies formed Alternet; Advanced Network and Systems (ANS) was formed by IBM, MERIT, and MCI (with its ANS CO+RE commercial subsidiary); CERFNet was initiated by General Atomics which also runs the San Diego Supercomputer Center; JVNCNet became GES, Inc., offering commercial services; Sprint formed Sprintlink; Infonet offered Infolan service; the Swedish PTT offered SWIPNET, and comparable services were offered in the UK and Finland. The Commercial Internet eXchange was organized by commercial Internet service providers as a traffic transfer point for unrestricted service.

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