Why 1995 was the year the internet grew up

The internet wasn’t born whole—it came together from parts. Most know of ARPANET, the internet’s most famous precursor, but it was always limited strictly to government use. It was NSFNET that brought many networks together, and the internet that we use today is almost NSFNET itself.

Almost, but not quite: in 1995, the government that had raised the internet from its infancy gave it a firm shove out the door. Call it a graduation, or a coming of age. I think of it as the internet getting its first real job.

In the early 1980s, the National Science Foundation sought to establish the United States as a leader in scientific computing. The plan required a fleet of supercomputers that researchers could readily use, a difficult feat when the computers routinely cost more than the buildings that housed them. Business computing had solved similar problems with time-sharing and remote terminals, and ARPANET had demonstrated that terminals could be connected to computers across the country using a packet-switching network.

This story is part of 1995 Week, where we’ll revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago.

The Computer Science Network, or CSNET, was the NSF’s first foray into wide area networking. It connected universities that didn’t have defense contracts and, as a result, had been left out of ARPANET. With dozens of sites, CSNET was much smaller than ARPANET but proved that a group of universities could share computing resources.

When the NSF funded five cutting-edge supercomputing centers in 1985, it planned to make them available to users over a similar network. The problem was that big computers invited big data: CSNET just wasn’t fast enough for interactive work with large data sets, and it was falling further behind as traffic doubled about every two weeks. After a sluggish 56 Kbps pilot effort (about a thousand times slower than today’s common broadband connections), the NSF contracted the University of Michigan to develop an all-new replacement based on MERIT—a Michigan inter-university network that had already started to expand its high-speed digital telephone and geostationary satellite links into other states. In 1987, the MERIT team brought on IBM and upstart long-distance carrier MCI, freshly invigorated by the antitrust breakup of their principal competitor and truly feeling their oats. They worked at a breakneck pace. In under a year, NSFNET connected the supercomputing centers and a half dozen regional networks at blistering T1 speeds: 1.5 Mbps—an almost 28-fold increase.

Just after 8 p.m. on June 30, 1988, Hans-Werner Braun, the project’s co-principal investigator, sent an email to the NSFNET mailing list to announce these new high-capacity links—among the fastest long-distance computer connections ever deployed—with typical scientific understatement: “The NSFnet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on.”

Braun’s email “received little notice at the time,” the NSF wrote in a 2008 announcement. But “those simple words announced the birth of the modern Internet.”

NSFNET was a runaway success. Besides its massive capacity, the network maintained an open door for interconnection. Overseas academic computer networks established peer connections with NSFNET, and in 1989 the federal government opened two Federal Internet Exchanges that routed traffic between NSFNET, ARPANET, and other government networks. The superior speed of NSFNET meant that these exchanges served mostly to bring NSFNET to federal users, and ARPANET’s fate was sealed. The military network, birthplace of many internet technologies, was deemed obsolete and decommissioned the next year. At the turn of the 1990s, NSFNET had become the Internet: the unified backbone by which regional and institutional networks came together.

NSFNET never stopped growing. It was a remarkable problem: at every stage, NSFNET traffic grew faster than anticipated. During 1989 alone, traffic increased by five times. The state of the art T1 links were overwhelmed, demanding a 1991 upgrade to 45 Mbps T3 connections. To manage the rapidly expanding infrastructure, the original NSFNET partners formed Advanced Network and Services (ANS). ANS was an independent nonprofit that could be called the first backbone ISP, the service provider that service providers themselves connected to.

The popularity of this new communications system was not limited to government and academia. Private industry took note as well. During the 1980s, “online services” had sprouted: companies like CompuServe, PlayNet, and AOL that are often considered early ISPs but were, in fact, something else. Online services, for both businesses and consumers, were walled gardens. They descended from time-sharing systems that connected users to a single computer, providing only a “curated” experience of software provided by the online service itself.

The internet, in the tradition of ARPANET and especially NSFNET, was very different. It was a collection of truly independent networks, autonomous systems, with the freedom to communicate across geographical and organizational boundaries. It could feel like chaos, but it also fostered innovation.

The internet offered possibilities that the online services never could. Douglas Van Houweling, director of the MERIT office, called NSFNET’s university origin “the only community that understands that great things can happen when no one’s in charge.”

At first, it was contractors who took their business to the internet. ARPANET had always been strictly for government business, but still, companies with the privilege of ARPANET connections found it hard not to use them for other work. Despite prohibitions, ARPANET users exchanged personal messages, coordinated visits, and even distributed the first spam. NSFNET’s much wider scope, welcoming anyone with a nexus to research or education, naturally invited users to push the limits further. 

Besides, the commercial internet was starting to form. CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee had invented HTML and, along with it, the World Wide Web. In 1993, NCSA—one of the same NSF supercomputing centers that NSFNET was built to connect—released Mosaic, the first popular web browser. Early private ISPs, companies like PSINet and Cerfnet, started out as regional academic networks (New York and California’s). There was obvious business interest, and for cash-strapped academic networks paying customers were hard to turn down. NSFNET went into business on its own, with ANS establishing its own for-profit commercial subsidiary called ANS CO+RE. 

The term “internet backbone” still finds use today, but in a less literal sense. NSFNET truly was the spine of the early 1990s internet, the only interconnection between otherwise disparate networks. It facilitated the internet’s growth, but it also became a gatekeeper: NSF funding came with the condition that it be used for research and education. NSFNET had always kept a somewhat liberal attitude towards its users’ online activities, but the growth of outright for-profit networks made the conflict between academia and commerce impossible to ignore.

Several commercial ISPs established their own exchange, an option for business traffic to bypass NSFNET, but it couldn’t provide the level of connectivity that NSFNET did. Besides, ANS itself opposed fragmentation of the internet and refused to support direct interconnection between other ISPs. In 1992, a series of NSFNET policy changes and an act of Congress opened the door to business traffic on a more formal basis, but the damage was done. A divide had formed between the internet as an academic venture and the internet as a business, a divide that was only deepened by mistrust between upstart internet businesses and incumbent providers ANS, IBM, and MCI.

The network was not the only place that cracks formed. Dating back to ARPANET, a database called the Domain Name System maintained a mapping between numeric addresses and more human-friendly names. While DNS was somewhat distributed, it required a central organization to maintain the top level of the hierarchy. There had been different databases for different networks, but consolidation onto NSFNET required unifying the name system as well. By 1993, all of the former name registries had contracted the work to a single company called Network Solutions.

At first, Network Solutions benefited from the same federal largesse as NSFNET. Registry services were funded by government contracts and free to users. Requests came faster and faster, though, and the database grew larger and larger. In 1995, Network Solutions joined the ranks of the defense industrial complex with an acquisition by SAIC. Along with the new owner came new terms: SAIC negotiated an amendment to the NSF contracts that, for the first time, introduced a fee to register a domain name. Claiming a name on the internet would run $100 per two years.

By then, commercial ISPs had proliferated. Despite policy changes, NSFNET remained less enthusiastic about commercial users than academic ones. Besides, traffic hadn’t stopped growing, and improved routing technologies meant the network could scale across multiple routes. The internet became competitive. MCI, benefiting from their experience operating NSFNET links, had built its own backbone network. Sprint, never far behind MCI, had one too. ANS reorganized their assets, placing much of their backbone infrastructure under their commercial operations. Government support of the increasingly profit-driven internet seemed unwise and, ultimately, unnecessary.

In April of 1995, the internet changed: NSF shut down the NSFNET backbone. The government funded, academically motivated core of the internet was replaced by a haphazard but thriving interconnection of commercial ventures. ANS, now somewhat lost for purpose, stepped out into the new world of internet industry and sold its infrastructure to AOL. Network Solutions became embroiled in a monopoly controversy that saw DNS reorganized into a system of competitive private registrars. Modems became standard equipment on newly popular personal computers, and millions of Americans dialed into a commercial ISP. We built communities, businesses, and the shape of the 21st century over infrastructure that had been, just years before, a collection of universities with an NSF grant.

The internet, born in the 1960s, spent its young adult years in the university. It learned a lot: the policies, the protocols, the basic shape of the internet, all solidified under the tutelage of research institutions and the NSF. And then, the internet graduated. It went out, got a job, and found its own way. Just where that way leads, we’re still finding out.

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