History
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.
NSF brought in Dennis Jennings in 1985 to establish the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). Jennings decided that NSFNET would be a general-purpose research network, it would be a hub to connect regional networks at supercomputing sites, and that it would make use of the ARPANET's very successful TCP/IP protocol. 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, 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 along with the NSF-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research, providing 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. The six backbone sites were interconnected with leased 56 kbit/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 minicomputers with routing and management software - called Fuzzballs - served as the network routers since they already implemented the TCP/IP standard. As regional networks began to grow the NSFNET backbone experienced exponential growth in its network traffic. As a result of a November 1987 NSF award to the Merit Network, a consortium of public universities in Michigan, the original 56 kbit/s links were upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s (T1) by July 1988 and to 45 Mbit/s (T3) in 1991.
Incidentally, the network manager for NCSA during the NSFNET development was Ed Krol, who also authored the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet to help users of the NSFNET understand its capabilities, and which turned out to be one of the first help manuals for the Internet.
The NSF entered into a cooperative agreement with the Merit Network and its partners IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan to upgrade the network in 1987, and traffic on the network started to double every seven months. The NSFNET was the principal Internet backbone starting in approximately 1988, when it included connectivity to the networks BARRNet, Merit/MichNet, MIDnet, NCAR, NorthWestNet, SESQUINET, SURAnet, and Westnet, which in turn connected about 170 additional networks to the NSFNET. NSFNET was the transition between the US Department of Defense's ARPANET, largely populated by computer researchers, and the commercial Internet of the mid-1990s. Some critical 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 originally learned via multiple paths from the ARPANET, but also from the regional networks. This then turned the Internet into a meshed infrastructure, backing away from the single-core architecture which the ARPANET had been using before.
Further information: History of the Internet
Privatization
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 overseen 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 and run by Hans-Werner Braun at the Merit Network and statistics were collected by Cornell University.
From 1987 to 1995 the NSFNET Backbone was designed, managed, and operated on behalf of the NSF by Merit Network, Inc., a non-profit corporation governed by the State of Michigan's public universities. Eric M. Aupperle, Merit's President, was the NSFNET Project Director, and Hans-Werner Braun was Principal Investigator. IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan were additional project partners.
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.
Controversy
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 where other companies allegedly were more competitive. 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.
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