National Science Foundation Network - History

History

Following the deployment of the Computer Science Network (CSNET), a network that provided Internet services to academic computer science departments, in 1981, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) aimed to create an academic research network facilitating access by researchers to the supercomputing centers funded by NSF in the United States.

In 1985, NSF began funding the creation of five new supercomputing centers: the John von Neumann Computing Center at Princeton University, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the campus of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse.

Also in 1985, under the leadership of Dennis Jennings, the NSF established the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). NSFNET was to be a general-purpose research network, a hub to connect the five supercomputing centers along with the NSF-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to each other and to the regional research and education networks that would in turn connect campus networks. Using this three tier network architecture NSFNET would provide access between the supercomputer centers and other sites over the backbone network at no cost to the centers or to the regional networks using the open TCP/IP protocols initially deployed successfully on the ARPANET.