A day late, but at least my heart is in the right place. It's really hard to imagine what networking was like before The National Science Foundation rolled out the NSFNet: lots of different networks (BITnet, USEnet) running lots of different protocols (SNA, DECnet, UUCP). NSF made two really important decisions:
- Standardizing on TCP/IP meant that any computer could hook up to NSFnet. This was important to the universities, which had pretty much ever old sort of computer ever made.
- While it was modeled on the DoD's ARPAnet, NSF let pretty much anyone - education, government, or private companies - use their backbone. In essence, it created the Internet.
All snark aside, Al Gore was actually pretty instrumental in pushing funding for this. NSFnet was all T-1, and they weren't cheap. While we think it's dog slow today (at least if you have broadband), it was pretty smoking fast at the time. Just as a reference point, 4 years after NSFnet came online, 12 other engineers and I shared a 32 kbps Frame Relay link, and thought we were the coolest network kids in the neighborhood.
Of course,
nobody thought about security at the time. And of course, it only took 4 months for
someone to show that this was
A Bad Thing.
All of this was back when my Network-fu was strong, like
Chris. Back when my email went to
Dockmaster. I sound like such an old fart.
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