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NSFnet — 20 Years of Internet Obscurity and Insight
coondoggie writes "The National Science Foundation (NSF) reissued the words that started the Internet revolution 20 years ago today:
'The NSFnet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on.'
That was the email sent to users of the NSF's fledgling NSFnet to announce that the network's backbone had been upgraded to a 'blazing T-1 speed.' NSFnet was created by NSF a few years earlier in an attempt to create a computer network similar to the Department of Defense's ARPANET.
When the original six-node, 56 kilobits-per-second NSFnet backbone went into operation in 1986, NSF made the decision to allow any academic, governmental or commercial entity to hook up to this network of networks. Within a few weeks of going online, traffic on the new network began doubling every few weeks. The network's backbone of core 56 kilobits-per-second connections were considered fast, but they were not fast enough to satisfy the demands of all the new users who were coming online, according to the NSF."
NSFWnet. Anyone else read it that way?
I really should get to bed earlier...
Wannabe internet.
Can someone travel back 20 years and stop this from hapenning? pretty please.
when networkworld fix their crappy website
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
When I was a kid I had the idea of networking every BBS together. My plan was basically to run a "management" multi-node BBS in every city via a dedicated modem/phone line that would connect to another management node in the next city (assuming it was a local call) -- theoretically one phone line/modem per outlying city that was a local call...ultimately, chats, messages and files could be sent through the links far and wide through the network of locally dialed/connected BBSs.
I know this was done in more or less an offline manner with message nets, but, I wanted something that was more real-time.
As an example, given cities A, B, and C, where their geographical layout is A - B - C, and people in city A have to pay long distance charges to dial city C, an interconnect or pass through in city B could allow people in city A to communicate with people in city C free of charge.
I had no idea that regular people would be so interested in stuff like that, but, apparently they are...I had no idea of the true potential of stuff like Email and websites (or message and file boards)
I didn't know what to do about crossing state/federal borders, but hey, I was a kid.
With all the video sharing, socialmedia bubble, the larger use of SOA, how long will the present speeds satisfy?
My friends who worked for the Physics department got to use the Internet though, because they ran Unix. They had all the source to it too - my friends' jobs was hacking on it.
One of their jobs was making troff output to graphics printers; the original troff only worked with phototypesetters, which were amazing optical devices that got their letterforms from images on filmstrips. The typesetter would load the film for the font you wanted, say to switch from bold to italic, then use the optics to scale the image onto photo paper at the right point size.
There was a huge debate in the astronomy department as to whether we should get on the Internet; it was thought that the expense of porting all of our data analysis software to Unix wouldn't be worth it. It was all written in FORTRAN!
I later transferred to UC Santa Cruz. I think they were on the Internet when I started in 1985, but it may have only been UUCP - Unix to Unix Copy Program, suitable for email and Usenet but not remote login. It worked great for file transfer too, if you knew the bang path from one end to the other. You might have to wait several days for your file to show up, but it generally arrived OK.
Later when I was a sysadmin at Octel Communications, I wrote a shell script called getrfc that would use UUCP to fetch the desired RFC from the IETF file server. My users thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Anyway, I knew for sure that at some point UCSC's only connection to the Internet backbone was a 56k leased line to the SF Bay Area, probably to Stanford. This was a campus of thirteen thousand students - which gave out free Unix accounts for the asking! - and thousands of staff and faculty, all connected to the rest of the world via the equivalent of a single 56k dialup connection. But it seemed to work really well!
It happened that I went back to school at UCSC this summer to sharpen my Computer Science skills (my degree is in physics, so my programming is all self-taught). It blew my mind that I could register for classes via a web page from my home in Silicon Valley - the web didn't even exist when I was an undergrad.
I was also quite surprised to find power outlets on each of the desks in the lecture hall. For laptops you know.
I remember being in high school, and my father telling me that someday there would be such a thing as a laptop. I found it hard to imagine.
Kids These Days. You don't know how good you've got it!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
BBSs did this back in the day. Hell, I cant remember what it was called but there would be 3am BBS to BBS phone calls which exchanged forum posts, emails, etc. Worked well, at least in the Chicago area BBSs.
You are probably talking about FidoNet.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Even though commercial carriers received large tax breaks, they were unable to get fiber to the majority of homes as they promised. Maybe there needs to be a government entity that can do it instead.
It was only a small step from NSF to NSFW.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
I don't know how it worked exactly, but I fondly remember the days of many BBSes that ran Major BBS software linking up together. It may have been called MajorNet and it allowed not only forums but live chat as well. It was a real kick to be chatting realtime with someone in Iceland!
640 Kilobits should be fast enough for anyone.
Start a happiness pandemic
Is that thing still around?
For those of you who have really never heard of it before, the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) was a major part of early 1990s Internet backbone.
Basically, here's what happened: 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 supercomputers. In 1985, the NSF began funding the creation of five new supercomputer centers: the John von Neumann Center at Princeton University, the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the campus of the University of California at San Diego, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The NSFNet connected these five centers and allowed access to their supercomputers over the network at no cost. The NSFNet went online in 1986, using a TCP/IP-based 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 original 56- kbit/s links were upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s in 1988 and again to 45 Mbit/s in 1991.
When did privatization begin? Well, In the early 1990s, commercial organizations connecting to the Internet had to sign a usage agreement directly with NSFNet to gain access to large parts of the public internet, regardless of what Internet Service Provider they purchased Internet access from.The original 56-kb/s backbone was operated by the supercomputer centers themselves with the lead taken by Ed Krol at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. PDP-11/73 Fuzzball routers were configured by the University of Michigan and statistics collected by Cornell University. From 1987 to 1995 the NSFNET was operated on behalf of the NSF by Merit Network, Inc., a non-profit corporation governed by public Universities. On April 30, 1995, the NSFNET Backbone Service was successfully transitioned to a new architecture, where traffic is exchanged at interconnection points called Network access points.
However, some aspects of NSFnet have been controversial. For much of the period from 1987 to 1995 there was concern by some Internet stakeholders, following NSFNET's opening up the Internet, over the effects of privatization and the manner in which IBM and MCI were given a perceived competitive advantage in "leveraging" federal research money to gain ground in fields that other companies were allegedly more competitive in. The Cook Report on the Internet, which still exists, evolved as one of its largest critics. Other writers, such as Chetly Zarko, a University of Michigan alumnus and freelance investigative writer, offered their own critiques.
I hope you've enjoyed reading this history of NSFnet as much as I enjoyed researching it! (Using the Internet!)
Suggested moderation: +1 Informative, +1 Insightful.
Fidonet and all the echomail networks which appeared after that, using the very same protocol.
Fidonet used zones from 1-6 (1-North America, 2-Europe, 3-Asia(?), 4-Latin America.. etc), each BBS had an unique address, such as 4:804/3 etc.
Fidonet addressing was organized as ZONE:REGION/NODE or (less common) ZONE:REGION/NODE.USER.
Other networks used unallocated zones, such as 39-Amiga Net, 20-Lusonet, 65-Mufonet.. etc.
In Brazil there were a number of nationwide Portuguese-speaking networks too: 12-RBT, 30-Syncnet, 100-Canal 100, 120-AmigaNET-BR etc etc.
I remember there was even a e-mail-like service (called netmail), so you could send a private message to JoeUser@12:345/6.
There are so many histories.. Such as the power struggle between Brazil vs Mexico (in ~1993) for being the main Latin America hub of Fidonet. It was quite a dirty war, at some point Mexico stopped routing messages from Brazil and things like that. -- I remember in the end Mexico "won" but both brazilians users and sysops were so pissed off that everyone migrated to RBT and Fidonet in Brazil suddenly died (later it recovered, but RBT remained the most active network in this country).
Of course, the Internet did not grow out of private-sector innovation and investment but off the government teat - for decades. I don't see much innovation either other than wiz-bang graphics, the ability to download crappy movies and shop. Things seem to have gone backwards since the mid 1990s to me - an open, social chat system like IRC is replaced by corporate mostly one-on-one chat like AIM (also security has lessened - everyone used to have DCC chat etc.) An open, sometimes intelligent message board like Internet went downhill.
The Fed has open its vaults and floats not only Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase, but all of Wall Street, the latter going mostly unnoticed due to the headlines about the former. Across the country from the Internet, to military contractors and the aerospace industry, business is propped up by government spending. Yet we are told how horrible big government and socialism and the like is because of so-called private sector innovation and investment. Right after 9/11, when Congress bailed out the airline stockholders, but not the workers, Dick Armey said bailing out the workers as well was not "commensurate with the American spirit". He's got that right.
pffbt, NSFnet, all you had to do to hack the network is type NSF001 for the username and smashthestate for the password and you got admin acess.
is a series of tubes
There was also WAFFLE which used UUCP to interchange data. You could UUCP from waffle to waffle (UUCP is UUCP, when it works... I have a lot of experience with it both working and not working on many different Unices) but I used it to connect to a SCO Unix system :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now that you've mentioned UUCP, I remembered that at some point (since 1991, 1992..) echomail networks started to offer a e-mail (internet) gateway in certain Fidonet-based networks.
Fidonet itself had this, RBT (AFAIR) had it too, probably others (major ones) aswell.
It was something like you sent a netmail to Gateway@1:234/5 and the subject was the e-mail address.
Your "email" would be something like YourName%2:345/6@gateway.blabla.org.
It might sound awful now but back then, for most people, it was the only way you could contact someone in the internet.
I remember the first time I've heard about I was like "oh, this is so cool" and shortly after "uh, I don't know anyone with an e-mail address"
Those were the days.
That was the start of the IP Internet. The 'Matrix' (as John Quarterman called it then) has already been coming together for a decade as a loosely coupled set of independent networks using different protocols internally. I remember using DecNet in 1980 to chat and e-mail between Ireland and California. I was also on several interconnected BBS (think FidoNet, and later CompuServe) and AMPRNet in '82 (only 1200 baud but we built our own infrastructure and did not need an ISP :-)
IP made things much easier when we started using the same protocol on all the nets.
P.S. Race you to the 9600 admin line.
P.P.S GET OFF MY LAWN!
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will
'The NSFnet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on.'
So began the rape of the English language that continues on the Internet to this day.
Damn you. I read the parent post and though "Ah ha! Now is my chance to feel old and wise and mention fidonet". Instead, you and several others already replied, so now I'm just old and late to the game as usual.
I do miss the old dial up bbs days, though. Good times.
Only loosely related, but a few years back I actually ran into someone on the internet, completely by chance, who I used to chat with on a local dialup bbs where I grew up nearly 10 years after all of the bbs' died out and I had moved halfway across the country. That was really cool.
whoever modded this troll should age another 20 years.
MP3 Search Engine
Was there ever a geek who used a BBS and didn't think of this?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Vi går dit kuken pekar
It means, roughly "Let's use my PENIS as a compass".
Your question should probably be "You go where, relative to your PENIS?"
Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction to fidonet to usenet gatewaying. I ended up getting an account on a couple of free-access SCO Unix systems in Santa Cruz, gorn and the armory. Then I got Xenix for 286 (my computer at the time was a 286@6MHz with 1MB RAM and a 40 MB RLL disk) and started playing with UUCP, and the rest is history. (I also ran AmigaUUCP for a while, and even UUPC...)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"When I was a kid I had the idea of networking every BBS together."
Seriously? I feel so inadequate. I just played with Legos.
A bunch of folks are bemoaning the 56k number, as it seems rather an odd rate. Awright younguns, hop up here on Uncle MigraineMan's lap while he tells you a story ...
... and was a circuit board about the size of an ATX motherboard. Not wanting to transmit all those pesky bits, another bunch of smart lads realized that the human ear isn't a linear device, so they encoded the 14-bit linear samples using the dreaded u-Law encoding table. That made each sample a more manageable 8-bit value.
... anybody?
Back when communicating between two distant places involved two tin cans and some wet string, some mighty smart folks invented digital telephony. First, they decided to sample the voice audio at 8kHz - after all, they were only obligated to deliver audio bandwidth in the 300-3000 Hz range (affectionately referred to as "three hundred to three K C" back in the day.) You might be surprised to find that a 14-bit analog-to-digital converter that sampled at 8kHz was quit the engineering marvel
Whelp1: But Uncle MigraineMan, what's that got to do with 56k?
Now just settle down a bit. [MM sips from pocket flask.] So the bright young engineers decide that 24 is a nice round number, so they grouped 24 voice channels together into a Digital Signal 1, or DS1. If you follow with the math, you multiply 8-bits by 8000 samples per second to get 64000 bits per second, then by the 24 channels to get
Whelp2: 1,536,000. But Uncle MigraineMan, everybody knows that a DS1 is 1.544Mbps!
That's right. One of them bright young engineers realized that they couldn't tell head from tail with all the voice channels looking the same, so they added some bits to mark the start and end of the DS1. That brings us up to the current line rate.
After a while, the phone company - and note that I said "the" phone company, as there was only one at the time - started using these fancy DS1 signals as connections within their network. They started noticing that when a bunch of calls on a DS1 were silent, sometimes the DS1 equipment would drop out, causing many disgruntled customers. And as I always say, if it affects the revenue stream, it gets immediate attention.
The bright young engineers studied the problem, and discovered that a long period of silence could cause a long string of all-zeroes in the fancy DS1 signal, causing the terminal hardware to think the line had been cut. To remedy this situation, the bright young engineers decided to add some "1" bits to the audio channels to maintain what they call "ones density." That's a fancy way of sayin' they limit the number of consecutive zeroes so the fancy DS1 line equipment doesn't get confused. They decided that, since this is voice audio, and they've already compressed it with the dreaded u-Law code, no one would notice if they "stole" that least-significant-bit and made it always a "1". It is, after all, "least significant." Who's going to miss it?
Whelp1: So there's only 7-bits of usable data in each voice channel? That's nuts!
Well, it made sense at the time. Eventually, computer usage forced the phone company to upgrade it's equipment to support "clear channel" transport, instead of the "robbed bit" format. That caused a whole passle of problems during the transition. Ultimately, something called B8ZS was pretty much universally adopted. Another day, I'll tell you a scary story about something called ZBTSI. Now y'all run along.
No, back in the mid-80's we actually could stream text in realtime. Although with a 300 Baud Modem (.3kbps) you could read the text faster than it could be sent to your computer, but with 1200 Baud (1.2kbps) the text would come too fast to read and you'd have to scroll through it.
These low speeds made the pr0n really bad and of such low-quality that I switched over to interacting with real women. If we had better technology then that was affordable, I might never have left the basement . . .
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
I remember in the mid-80s a friend of mine would dial into the Merit Network for this type of connection. Something he was doing wasn't completely legit (LD codes and such) and he ended up getting HUGE phone bills months later.
Coincidentally, Merit was the group that received grants from the NSF to implement this new network.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
The first Terminator movie came out three years before the NSF backbone and ten eyars before the popular Mosaic browser. They predicted a destructive linking of defense computers called SkyNet.
Oh the aged-geek-cred of having desperately desired a 1200 Baud modem! Unfortunately for my aged-geek-cred I didn't discover BBSes in the 80s.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
You are probably talking about FidoNet.
Yes, mostly...unfortunately, this sort of thing was far beyond anything I could construct myself. What my ideal implementation included was the ability to connect through a gateway to another BBS -- i.e. user in city A connects to BBS in city B, then has the ability to dial any BBS in city C by selecting it from a list or whatever, and potentially city D, E, F, and so on...unfortunately, that really meant that one user could occupy an indefinite number of phone lines, hopping all over the place.
Anyway...the idea sounded good.
al gore...it all makes sense now...
Good people go to bed earlier.
One of (if not the) earliest commerical clients on the Net was a small computer graphics company called Omnibus Computer Graphics. Back in 1985 we had three sites - Toronto Canada, NYC and on the Paramount Studio lot in Hollywood. These three sites were connected by X.25 and later became clients on NSFNet... I think we got there by virtu of being partially funded by Arts Council of Canada.
We had developers and animators (sales & mgmt too) in all three locations. We had a distributed software development setup that collected local information every night, shipped it to the Toronto node, rebuilt it and shipped bytes & RCS back. Developers (such as myself) sometimes dialed in from home (Venice Beach) to work on our Vaxes, PDP-10, SGI, and The Foonly (a strange beast that rendered many of the early movie CGI - Tron, Westworld, etc.)
The company later (1986) bought two of the other top 5 CGI houses (Robert Able Assoc & Digital Productions) and proceeded to go bankrupt.
That led to the explosion of CGI houses like Rythm & Hues, etc.
J.Isdale
> After a while, the phone company - and note that I said "the" phone company, as there was only one at the time
No, that is false, even within the USA. I know, as I was stuck on one of those little one or two town phone companies growing up (although visiting and seeing the klickitty-klack electro-mechanicals was fun in grade and high school) growing up and while in college, and discovered just how much noise crossing the company boundaries caused. Actually, I still am, at home, as the local company was bought by another not-very-big company, that was bought by a large-but-not-that-big company, that was bought by a larger-but-still-not-an-ILEC company.
Yes there was more companies, GTE comes to mind as the second largest, but still no one had the scale and nationwide coverage (and long distance monopoly) that the "old" AT&T did. Hell back in the day, people had to rent their phones, you couldn't own them. Amazing. Good thing there is nothing like that today. Hmmm where did I put my cable box remote? Nevermind....
The Internet is the result of a continuing sequence of contributions from many different sources, dating back to the 1960s. The transition from the original Arpanet to the Internet began in the 1970s, with the technical proposal by Cerf and Kahn and the ensuing research funded by DARPA. It developed the core technologies that are still in use -- IP, TCP, SMTP, DNS. (The Web came later and separately.)
The Arpanet officially became the Internet in January, 1983. This was a DARPA action.
NSF's contribution began separately, in 1980, as an adjunct to the Arpanet, with CSNet, which was originally a dial-up network, and served as a kind of market research for the NSFNet project. It gave Arpanet access to research and academic sites that could not afford the cost of direct Arpanet connection.
NSFNet continued increasing access, which by now was to the existing Internet. It caused two more significant enhancements: 1) multiple backbones, and 2) regional backbones. The first required creating a new core routing protocol. Major technical enhancement. Allowed competition at the very "top" of the Internet.
The second set the stage for the modern, commercial Internet, by establishing a large-scale hierarchy of relay backbone networks, almost all of which transitioned into commercial form. This was an administrative enhancement, rather than a technical one.
(original administrator of CSNet email relaying.)
Dave Crocker bbiw.net