Reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of NSFnet, Internet Origins

The NYT and news.com have up an article looking back at the NSFnet's influence on the development of the internet. From the National Science Foundation's gamble came the TCP/IP standard we know and love today; when NSFnet was shut down in 1996 it was apparently connecting some 6 million computers. The piece also talks about the (sometimes tense) relationship between private and commercial interests. "The Internet 'was an alien concept to the communication industry when it began growing.' While there was no risk for MCI, which was then an upstart trying to gain ground on AT&T, that was not true of IBM. The company played a crucial role in the development of the Internet, and it did so despite the fact that the new network was a direct competitive threat to its multibillion-dollar communications networking business, based on a competing standard known as Systems Network Architecture, or SNA."

Comments

Without them things could have been very different

[Chrisq]

Remember the OSI protocol. How would the internet have turned out if this had been the major player? We would have probably followed the model to have separate presentation and application layer. This might have meant that we had the semantic web from day 1 rather than HTTP and browsers. It might also have meant that the world wide web and popular use of the Internet was years later, or even that company controlled networks (like the original AOL) had dominance.

Re: Let's not forget also the TCP/IP unfixed flaws

[neutrino38]

Without reigniting the OSI / IETF war, I tend to agree with the post above. TCP/IP is a good thing because it has been the default protocol unifier but still need to be fixed to become the UNIFIED protocol.

1- keepalive : IBM's SNA has an efficient keepalive mechanism. TCP has one but I never saw it working properly.

2- unified session based protocol : for banking and transctional applications, sessions is a must. In the Web world, we 'emulate' this using coockies or other feeble replacement. SIP would be a good candidate but one has to see SIP to be embedded in browsers and used in conjucntion to HTTP outside the telephony world.

3- bandwidth management and media transport: RSVP has never been implemented on a large scale. IP falls short to ATM in that matter. What the Internet World needs to acknowledge is that not every application can sit on a connectionless protocol (IP) drop the stupid dogma of being the stupid network. What we need is virtual circuits (VC) over IP that in turn open virtual circuits over layer 2 protocols

4- Private vs public network - IP V4 took the assumption that every IP address was ment to be public (the famous end to end networking dogma). The use of NAT and private addresses has been seen as a hack. We now know that private network are here to stay and the example of the SS7 signaling where private network and the way to interconnect them together are normalized provide a clear way. I am not sure that IP V6 learned the lessons.

Emmanuel

Re: Let's not forget also the TCP/IP unfixed flaws

[spectrokid]

How about dropping the "everything is just glorified telnet" approach? What should a network do?
1: Identify a user;
2:Identify a machine;
3: Send a file (FTP, SMTP, HTTP);
4: Stream data continuously (Radio, Chat, IM).
Why is it we have 25 protocols which all implement a combination of the above 4?