what we consider todays internet is due to the efforts of the department of defense and

Fact Sheet

A Brief History of NSF and the Internet

Baronial 13, 2003

This material is bachelor primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please come across current contact information at media contacts.

Early on Years: 1960s-1994. The Internet that many of u.s.a. take for granted today arose from a serial of authorities-funded calculator networking efforts. In 1969, the precursor to the Net began with the U.S. Defense Department'southward ARPAnet. ARPA-funded researchers developed many of the protocols still used for most Cyberspace advice. Several other agencies besides adult networks so their researchers could communicate and share data. In 1981, for case, the National Scientific discipline Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to institute the Computer Scientific discipline Network (CSNET) to provide networking services to all university computer scientists.

In 1985, NSF considered how it could provide greater admission to the high-end computing resources at its recently established supercomputer centers. Because NSF intended the supercomputers to be shared past scientists and engineers around the country, any viable solution had to link many research universities to the centers.

NSFNET went online in 1986 and continued the supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per 2d—the speed of a typical computer modem today. In a short time, the network became congested and, by 1988, its links were upgraded to 1.5 megabits per 2d. A variety of regional research and teaching networks, supported in part by NSF, were continued to the NSFNET backbone, thus extending the Internet'south reach throughout the United States.

Creation of NSFNET was an intellectual leap. It was the first large-calibration implementation of Internet technologies in a complex environment of many independently operated networks. NSFNET forced the Cyberspace customs to iron out technical issues arising from the rapidly increasing number of computers and accost many practical details of operations, management and conformance.

Throughout its existence, NSFNET carried, at no cost to institutions, any U.S. research and education traffic that could accomplish it. At the same time, the number of Internet-connected computers grew from two,000 in 1985 to more than ii million in 1993. To handle the increasing data traffic, the NSFNET backbone became the first national 45-megabits-per-2nd Cyberspace network in 1991.

The history of NSFNET and NSF'southward supercomputing centers also overlapped with the rise of personal computers and the launch of the World wide web in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues at CERN, the European Arrangement for Nuclear Enquiry, in Geneva, Switzerland. The NSF centers developed many tools for organizing, locating and navigating through information, including one of the get-go widely used Web server applications. Simply mayhap the most spectacular success was Mosaic, the first freely available Spider web browser to permit Spider web pages to include both graphics and text, which was developed in 1993 past students and staff working at the NSF-supported National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In less than 18 months, NCSA Mosaic became the Spider web "browser of choice" for more a million users and set off an exponential growth in the number of Spider web servers also every bit Web surfers. Mosaic was the progenitor of mod browsers such every bit Microsoft Cyberspace Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Privatization: 1993-1998. Commercial firms noted the popularity and effectiveness of the growing Internet and built their own networks. The proliferation of individual suppliers led to an NSF solicitation in 1993 that outlined a new Net architecture that largely remains in place today.

From that solicitation, NSF awarded contracts in 1995 for three network access points, to provide connectedness points betwixt commercial networks, and one routing arbiter, to ensure an orderly substitution of traffic across the Net. In improver, NSF signed a cooperative agreement to constitute the next-generation very-high-performance Courage Network Service. A more than prominent milestone was the decommissioning of the NSFNET backbone in April 1995.

In the years following NSFNET, NSF helped navigate the route to a cocky-governing and commercially viable Net during a menses of remarkable growth. The most visible, and almost contentious, component of the Cyberspace transition was the registration of domain names. Domain name registration associates a man-readable graphic symbol string (such as "nsf.gov") with Net Protocol (IP) addresses, which computers employ to locate one another.

The Department of Defense funded early registration efforts considering virtually registrants were military machine users and awardees. By the early on 1990s, academic institutions comprised the majority of new registrations, so the Federal Networking Council (a group of regime agencies involved in networking) asked NSF to presume responsibleness for non-armed forces Internet registration. When NSF awarded a v-year agreement for this service to Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), in 1993, there were vii,500 domain names.

In September 1995, equally the need for Internet registration became largely commercial (97 percent) and grew by orders of magnitude, the NSF authorized NSI to charge a fee for domain name registration. Previously, NSF had subsidized the cost of registering all domain names. At that time, there were 120,000 registered domain names. In September 1998, when NSF's agreement with NSI expired, the number of registered domain names had passed ii million.

The twelvemonth 1998 marked the end of NSF's directly role in the Internet. That year, the network access points and routing arbiter functions were transferred to the commercial sector. And afterwards much debate, the Department of Commerce'due south National Telecommunication and Information Assistants formalized an agreement with the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN) for oversight of domain name registration. Today, anyone tin register a domain name through a number of ICANN-accredited registrars.

NSF after NSFNET. The decommissioning of NSFNET and privatization of the Cyberspace did not mark the end of NSF's involvement in networking. NSF continues to support many inquiry projects to develop new networking tools, educational uses of the Internet and network-based applications.

Through its programs, NSF helps research and education institutions—including those serving underrepresented minorities, rural areas, and Native American reservations—make and enhance their connections to the Net. NSF has besides been instrumental in providing international connections services that have bridged the U.S. network infrastructure with countries and regions including Europe, Mongolia, Africa, Latin America, Russia and the Pacific Rim. In addition, NSF has continued to extend the attain of the highest-performance U.Southward. inquiry and education networks by supporting connectivity and collaborations with their counterparts in Canada, Europe and Asia.

NSF Cyberspace Experts
Thomas Greene, senior program director in the CISE Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research division, oversees a number of NSF'due south post-NSFNET Net efforts, including national and international connections programs. tgreene@nsf.gov, 703-292-8948.

Larry Landweber, CISE senior advisor on networking, proposed the CSNET concept in 1979 and organized the workshops that led to its cosmos in 1981. He was an counselor to NSF during the development of NSFNET and helped plant the first Net gateways between the United States and countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America. llandweb@nsf.gov, 703-292-8900.

George Strawn, currently NSF's Principal Information Officer, was the NSFNET program director from 1991 to 1993. From 1993 to 1995, he was involved with defining and deploying the privatized Net compages, and from 1995 to 1998 as networking sectionalisation managing director, he led NSF's efforts in the Next Generation Internet Initiative. gstrawn@nsf.gov, 703-292-8102.

-NSF-

Media Contacts
David Hart, NSF, (703) 292-8070, e-mail: dhart@nsf.gov

The U.S. National Scientific discipline Foundation propels the nation forward past advancing fundamental inquiry in all fields of scientific discipline and technology. NSF supports enquiry and people by providing facilities, instruments and funding to back up their ingenuity and sustain the U.S. as a global leader in research and innovation. With a fiscal year 2022 budget of $viii.8 billion, NSF funds achieve all l states through grants to almost two,000 colleges, universities and institutions. Each yr, NSF receives more than twoscore,000 competitive proposals and makes near 11,000 new awards. Those awards include support for cooperative research with manufacture, Arctic and Antarctic inquiry and operations, and U.South. participation in international scientific efforts.

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