NSFNET
| National Science Foundation Network | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | Data |
| Location | USA |
| and | |
| Operator | Merit Network with IBM, MCI, the State of Michigan, and later ANS |
| Established | 1985 |
| Current status | Decommissioned April 30, 1995, superseded by the commercial Internet |
| Commercial? | No |
| Funding | National Science Foundation |
| Website | NSFNET history |
The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) beginning in 1985 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. NSFNET was also the name given to several nationwide backbone networks that were constructed to support NSF's networking initiatives from 1985 to 1995. Initially created to link researchers to the nation's NSF-funded supercomputing centers, through further public funding and private industry partnerships it developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.
Following the deployment of the Computer Science Network (CSNET), a network that provided Internet services to academic computer science departments, in 1981, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) aimed to create an academic research network facilitating access by researchers to the supercomputing centers funded by NSF in the United States.
In 1985, NSF began funding the creation of five new supercomputing centers:
Also in 1985, under the leadership of Dennis Jennings, the NSF established the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). NSFNET was to be a general-purpose research network, a hub to connect the five supercomputing centers along with the NSF-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to each other and to the regional research and education networks that would in turn connect campus networks. Using this three tier network architecture NSFNET would provide access between the supercomputer centers and other sites over the backbone network at no cost to the centers or to the regional networks using the open TCP/IP protocols initially deployed successfully on the ARPANET.
The NSFNET initiated operations in 1986 using TCP/IP. Its six backbone sites were interconnected with leased 56-kb/s links, built by a group including the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Cornell University Theory Center, University of Delaware, and Merit Network. PDP-11/73 minicomputers with routing and management software, called Fuzzballs, served as the network routers since they already implemented the TCP/IP standard.
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