ebeab

Sept 23rd, 1997

Internet History
Part One: Background Part Two: Gestation Part Three: Birth of ARPANet
Part Four: Networks Everywhere Part Five: Enter CERN Part Six: Bring on the Web
Part Seven: Explosion Related Links

 
Part 4

Networks Everywhere


The abilities that ARPANet demonstrated, especially with electronic mail, urged numerous communities to develop networks. Most of these networks were very specific and closed to the general public. Some of them were:

    MFENet by the Department of Energy for its researchers in Magnetic Fusion Energy,

    which sparked the HEPNet, DoE's High Energy Physicists Network,

    NASA Space Physicists followed with SPAN, and

    Rick Adrion, David Farber, and Larry Landweber established CSNET for the Computer Science community with an initial grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

    AT&T's free-wheeling dissemination of the UNIX computer operating system spawned USENET, based on UNIX' built-in UUCP communication protocols,

    and in 1981 Ira Fuchs and Greydon Freeman devised BITNET, which linked academic mainframe computers.

Also growing rapidly were numerous local area networks (LANs), due to Metcalfe's Ethernet technology. The LAN's along with PCs and workstations in the 1980s allowed the burgeoning Internet to flourish.

At the University of Wisconsin, in 1983, the name server was developed, and the first domain name server (DNS) was introduced in 1984.

In 1984 the British JANET, and in 1985 the U.S. NSFNET announce their intent to serve the entire higher education community, regardless of discipline. Indeed, a condition for a U.S. university to receive NSF funding for an Internet connection was that "... the connection must be made available to ALL qualified users on campus."

In 1985, Dennis Jennings came from Ireland to spend a year at NSF leading the NSFNET program. Working with the community Jennings help decided that NSFNET would use TCP/IP as the mandatory protocol. In 1986, Steve Wolff took over the NSFNET program. Wolff recognized the need for a wide area networking infrastructure to support the general academic and research community.

Now in 1985, the Internet consisted mainly of e-mail, telnet, USENET, FTP, and some other applications which allowed communication, and file sharing across the networks.

Part 5

Enter CERN

next

 

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e-mail: Marcus Kazmierczak, marcus@mkaz.com


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