NSFNET

Following the deployment of the CSNET, a network that linked academic computer science departments, in 1981, the NSF aimed to create an open network allowing academic researchers access to Super computers.

In 1985, the NSF began funding the creation of five new super computer centers.

The NSFNET connected these five centers and allowed access to their super computers over the network at no cost. The NSFNET went online in 1986, using a TCP/IP protocol that was compatible with ARPANET, as a backbone to which regional and academic networks would connect. It experienced exponential growth in its network traffic. The NSFNET was the principal internet backbone starting in approximately 1988, bridging between the rather restrictive US DoD creation of the internet, and it broad commercialization in the mid-1990’s. The NSFNET opened up the internet to the world some critical internet technologies, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are a direct result of that period in internet history. BGP was specifically created to allow the NSFNET backbone to differentiate routes learned via multiple paths from originally the ARPANET, but also from the regional networks. This then turned the internet into a mashed infrastructure, backing away from the single core architecture which the ARPANET had been using before.

The time of a federally provided general purpose backbone network for the research and science community is coming to a close as of April of 1995. Its roots stem from early ARPA research on packet switching and its development of the TCP/IP protocol suite, which the NSF elected for its NSFNET program in the mid-eighties, at a time of strong tendency towards GOSIP ISO protocols and Support for X.25.

1.1.1.    Evolving architecture for operational infrastructure