Happy 20th Birthday, Modern Internet!

“The NSFNet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on.” Twenty years ago, on the evening of June 30th, a network engineer named Hans-Werner Braun sent that text in an an e-mail message to users of the National Science Foundation’s fledgling NSFNet project. The network’s main lines, or backbone, had been upgraded, he said.

And that, according to Supercomputing Online today, was the birth of the modern Internet. In the early 1980s, NSF put together NSFNet as a network connecting regional computer networks around the country. The Department of Defense had already created the Arpanet network, which gave birth to many of the tools and techniques used on the modern Internet, but Arpanet traffic was limited to Defense-sponsored research. NSFNet was designed to be open to all users.

The design of NSFNet was awarded to a team made of MCI, IBM, and a computer-networking-technology consortium of Michigan universities called Merit Networks. Their main challenge: the network’s backbone ran at 56-kilobits per second. (That’s the old connection speed of a dial-up telephone modem.)

According to Supercomputing Online, George Strawn, who was in charge of the campus network at Iowa State University at the time, says that network users, frustrated by the clogged system, would “bang on my desk, ‘the network is too slow. I can’t use the thing.’”

The NSFNet supervisors upgraded to a 1.5 megabit-per-second capacity in 1988. Strawn said that people stopped banging on his desk.

For a while, at least. Network traffic from universities, commercial companies and individual users skyrocketed. And in 1995, NSFNet was decommissioned, replaced by robust backbones provided by commercial telecom companies. But without its demonstration of open access at high speeds, the modern Internet would not have lured millions of users. —Josh Fischman