NSFnet — 20 Years of Internet Obscurity and Insight 81
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."
DoubleTake (Score:5, Funny)
I really should get to bed earlier...
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NSFWnet. Anyone else read it that way?
I really should get to bed earlier...
No. Because I can read.
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NSFWnet. Anyone else read it that way?
I really should get to bed earlier...
..or just jerk off more.
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The NSFnet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on. Specifically porn. We feel that would provide an actual representation of bandwidth load.' To which someone responded: 'Heh. You said, 'load.'
And thus the tubes were born.
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Or less, this could be evidence that it really does make you go blind.
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Re:56k origins (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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> 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 w
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Umm... 9600kbps?
So they had modems that would do 9.6mbps? WOW, wonder why mine wont't do that now! Er. wait..
the backbone was 56kbps.. so that's 56,000 bps.. and you could get a Fast 9600 bps for home use...
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Yeah, I'm clearly getting old. I still think of them as the Northwest Secessionist Forces.
Pffft. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pffft. (Score:4, Funny)
Wannabe internet
Really. You can get 56 kilobits-per-second at home now.
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you should move :)
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Wannabe internet
Really. You can get 56 kilobits-per-second at home now.
That's "up to" 56 kilobits-per-second.
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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 . . .
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I will read the article (Score:1)
when networkworld fix their crappy website
I actually thought of doing this back in the day (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re:I actually thought of doing this back in the da (Score:5, Informative)
You are probably talking about FidoNet [fidonet.org].
Re:I actually thought of doing this back in the da (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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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,
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You are probably talking about FidoNet [fidonet.org].
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...th
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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
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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!
So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Was there ever a geek who used a BBS and didn't think of this?
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No, and in fact it was done fairly commonly, at least regionally. There were plenty of BBSes you could chat on that routed traffic between other BBSes in the local region... I never saw any go more than maybe a 50 mile radius, but you'd often have them straddling local calling areas.
Re:I actually thought of doing this back in the da (Score:2, Funny)
"When I was a kid I had the idea of networking every BBS together."
Seriously? I feel so inadequate. I just played with Legos.
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Coincidentally, Merit was the group that received grants from the NSF to implement this new network.
How long the present bandwidth stand? (Score:1)
I was at one of the earliest Internet sites... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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*cruises over to redhat.com to grab a DVD image of the latest Fedora Core using Bittorrent; pushes images up to Amazon EC2 to number crunch*
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I'll be 44 this year, and my first piece of kit of note was a Casio Mini in 1973.
Get off my lawn.
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You might have to wait several days for your file to show up...
Birth of Comcast also, eh? ;-)
The rest is history (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The rest is history (Score:4, Funny)
And with that small step comes the explanation why network traffic doubled every couple of weeks.
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Fake Bill Gates Says... (Score:5, Funny)
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A bit off-topic, but I have a small collection of 'choice' Inter-Action magazines from Sierra. One gives the MPC1/MPC2 specifications (minimum requirements for multimedia PC's: i.e., a 1x CD-ROM drive and soundblaster card.
What reminded me of this in your post is a particular article recommending quad speed CD-ROM drives as future-proof, as they could feed an MPEG2/4 decoder card fast enough for full-screen video, 'the most anybody will ever need'.
a little nsfnet history (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:a little nsfnet history (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, CSNET was only nominally for computer science research departments. Actually they'd let pretty much anybody on who'd pay the freight. The research "hoop" was held rather low. We (at CSNET) had one company online which was a computer graphic rendering house using CSNET as a transit net between their offices in Canada and the U.S.: a pure Internet application.
CSNET's real purpose was to find out if it was possible to run an IP network at a profit. We did, if only just, and so various of our customers turned into today's Tier 1 providers.
As far as I'm concerned, today's Internet may have grown from NSFnet, but the NSF funded CSNET first, and CSNET was the first ISP. Really, the Internet grew from CSNET via NSFnet, in my book.
Incidentally, my monicker, "Mr. Protocol", comes from a column I wrote for twelve years in Server/Workstation Expert magazine, but he was really born in the online CSNET Forum, emailed monthly to the membership. His first incarnation was online, not print, and was rather more trenchant than the ink-stained wretch he later became...though the latter was far, far more profitable. Definitely fitting for an Internet character.
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Since no one caught on, I'll clue you in: citations needed [wikipedia.org].
government and private sector (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Correct me if I am wrong, I believe it originally was illegal, by federal law, to transact commercial business via the internet, being that it was paid for by every American tax payer. I would like to know the legal history of when it became legit for the NSF to allow commercial business to be transacted via the Internet, if anyone has that info.
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If you think The Internet is all about web and chat, you're missing the point.
It is amasing that I can have IP level access to any machine, anywhere in the world. The possabilities are endless. Recent innovations include:
* VPN, Remote Access and other tunnels - allows for telecommuting, remote support etc.
* VOIP - cheap and scalable solution to circuit switched copper lines
* Web Services - sharing data between applications in a platform independant way
Add to that email, google, wikipedia etc and there's a
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I don't agree with you. Much has been posted in this thread about the BBS era but I don't think a lot of you have any idea how important it was. And to go even further, how important it was that we had phreakers before that. The BBS community came up with, among other things, chat, email and forums standards (kiss my ass usenet), file transfers, global communication, online games (Nethack is awesome but the BBS took it to a whole new level), and the original foundations of peer sharing. We did that with
NSF (Score:3, Funny)
That was when the Matrix became the Internet (Score:2, Informative)
IP made things much easier whe
You'll pry me 110 baud from me dead corpse laddy! (Score:1, Funny)
P.S. Race you to the 9600 admin line.
P.P.S GET OFF MY LAWN!
Re:You'll pry me 110 baud from me dead corpse ladd (Score:2)
whoever modded this troll should age another 20 years.
Beautifully phrased (not) (Score:3)
'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.
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"Ending sentences with prepositions is something up with which I shall not put!"
- Nobody really knows for sure
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Compare that with Orwell's examples, and you will see that the English language is well used to being raped.
"Terminator" movies predicted broken internet (Score:3, Interesting)
Early Commercial NSF Client - Computer Graphics (Score:1)
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 developm
The real NSFNet contributions (Score:1)
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 contributi