1987

The NSF, realizing the rate and commercial significance of the growth of the Internet, signs a cooperative agreement with Merit Networks which is assisted by IBM and MCI. Rick Adams co-founds UUNET to provide commercial access to UUCP and the USENET newsgroups, which are now available for the PC. BITNET and CSNET also merge to form CREN.The NSF starts to implement its T1 backbone between the supercomputing centers with 24 RT-PCs in parallel implemented by IBM as ‘parallel routers’. The T1 idea is so successful that proposals for T3 speeds in the backbone begin. In early 1987 the number of hosts passes 10,000 and by year-end there have been over 1,000 RFCs issued. Network management starts to become a major issue and it becomes clear that a protocol is needed between routers to allow remote management. SNMP is chosen as a simple, quick, near term solution.

1986

The 56Kbps backbone between the NSF centers leads to the creation of a number of regional feeder networks - JVNCNET, NYSERNET, SURANET, SDSCNET and BARRNET - among others. With the backbone, these regionals start to build a hub and spoke infrastructure. This growth in the number of interconnected networks drives a major expansion in the community including the DOE, DOD and NASA.

Between the beginning of 1986 and the end of 1987 the number of networks grows from 2,000 to nearly 30,000.

TCP/IP is available on workstations and PCs such as the newly introduced Compaq portable computer. Ethernet is becoming accepted for wiring inside buildings and across campuses. Each of these developments drives the introduction of terms such as bridging and routing and the need for readily available information on TCP/IP in workshops and manuals. Companies such as Proteon, Synoptics, Banyan, Cabletron, Wellfleet, and Cisco emerge with products to feed this explosion.

At the same time, other parts of the U.S. Government and many of the traditional computer vendors mount an attempt to validate their products being built to the OSI theoretical specifications, in the form of the Corporation for Open Systems.

USENET starts a major shakeup which becomes known as the ‘Great Renaming’. A driving force is that, as many messages are traveling over ARPANET, desirable new news groups such as ‘alt.sex’ and ‘alt.drugs’ are not allowed.

1985

NSF announces the award of five supercomputing center contracts: Cornell Theory Center (CTC), directed by Nobel laureate Ken Wilson; The John Von Neumann Center (JVNC) at Princeton, directed by computational fluid dynamicist Steven Orszag; The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), directed at the University of Illinois by astrophysicist Larry Smarr; The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), sharing locations at Westinghouse, the University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University, directed by Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies; The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, and administered by the General Atomics Company under the direction of nuclear engineer Sid Karin. By the end of 1985, the number of hosts on the Internet (all TCP/IP interconnected networks) has reached 2,000. MIT translates and publishes Computers and Communication by Dr. Koji Kobayashi, the Chairman of NEC. Dr. Kobayashi, who joined NEC in 1929, articulates his clear vision of ‘C & C’, the integration of computing and communication.

1983

In January, the ARPANET standardizes on the TCP/IP protocols adopted by the Department of Defense (DOD). The Defense Communications Agency decides to split the network into a public ‘ARPANET’ and a classified ‘MILNET, ‘ with only 45 hosts remaining on the ARPANET. Jon Postel issues an RFC assigning numbers to the various interconnected nets. Barry Leiner takes Vint Cerf’s place at DARPA, managing the Internet.Numbering the Internet hosts and keeping tabs on the host names simply fails to scale with the growth of the Internet. In November, Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris of USC/ISI and Craig Partridge of BBN develop the Domain Name System (DNS) and recommend the use of the now familiar user@host.domain addressing system. The number of computers connected via these hosts is much larger, and the growth is accelerating with the commercialization of Ethernet. Having incorporated TCP/IP into Berkeley Unix, Bill Joy is key to the formation of Sun Microsystems. Sun develops workstations that ship with Berkeley Unix and feature built-in networking. At the same time, the Apollo workstations ship with a special version of a token ring network. In July 1983, an NSF working group, chaired by Kent Curtis, issues a plan for ‘A National Computing Environment for Academic Research’ to remedy the problems noted in the Lax report. Congressional hearings result in advice to NSF to undertake an even more ambitious plan to make supercomputers available to US scientists.

1984

In January, Apple announces the Macintosh. Its user-friendly interface swells the ranks of new computer users.Novelist William Gibson coins the term cyberspace in Neuromancer, a book that adds a new genre to science fiction and fantasy. The newly developed DNS is introduced across the Internet, with the now familiar domains of .gov, .mil, .edu, .org, .net, and .com. A domain called .int, for international entities, is not much used. Instead, hosts in other countries take a two-letter domain indicating the country. The British JANET explicitly announces its intention to serve the nation’s higher education community, regardless of discipline. Most important for the Internet, NSF issues a request for proposals to establish supercomputer centers that will provide access to the entire U.S. research community, regardless of discipline and location. A new division of Advanced Scientific Computing is created with a budget of $200 million over five years. Datapoint, the first company to offer networked computers, continues in the marketplace, but fails to achieve critical mass.