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CSNet is never mentioned
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 12:30:00 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: "Peter J. Denning" <pjd () nps edu> Date: October 4, 2004 8:37:31 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Cc: jsq () internetperils com, lauren () vortex com, shoch () alloyventures com Subject: Re: CSNet is never mentioned Lauren et al -- Dave Farber sent me the correspondence concerning the traditions handed down to us from the early days of the Internet, with the lament in the subject line "CSNet is never mentioned". I thought I would comment because there are good stories to be told from this somewhat forgotten critical piece of Internet history. CSNET does have a chapter in WHEN WIZARDS STAY OUT LATE. The four of us (Landweber, Farber, Hearn, and I) proposed CSNET in 1980 because the ARPANET was closed and the few universities connected were pulling way ahead of the others in terms of research capability and contribution. We proposed CSNET as a technology clone of ARPANET that would bring the functionality to the entire CS research community. At the time the ARPANET was closed, to about 180 DoD contractor nodes, a handful of which were universities. The NSF wanted to help but was very cautious. They insisted that we be set up within the umbrellaship of UCAR, because they wanted CSNET to become self supporting within 5 years and UCAR had experience making university consortia work. We were funded for $5M for 5 years with this mandate. By 1985 we had achieved the primary goal of connecting all 120 CS PhD departments and industry labs. We had a governance structure that was self supporting. We created and provided several technologies to make the network usable for the community: Phonenet (based on MMDF and SMTP) that exchanged email by phone dialup; Telenet, a version of TCP/IP that ran over X.25 on GTE Telenet, thus providing the ARPANET protocols to those willing to pay the bill; a nameserver; and a bridge to the ARPANET. We negotiated two key deals between ARPA and NSF: (1) A policy statement that declared NSF grantees within the CSNET to be authorized users of ARPANET facilities; and (2) A policy statement that allowed commercial companies such as IBM and HP to put traffic on CSNET (and hence on ARPANET). These were the key policy statements that opened up the network to non-DOD and to commercial members. By 1985, the success of CSNET was quite visible within the NSF communities. Many others started asking NSF to provide networking for them as well -- connecting the supercomputing centers and giving them network access to them and to each other. NSF responded by creating committees to help it create and implement NSFNET. These committees were initially populated by alumni of the CSNET project. The NSFNET backbone became the Internet backbone and ... well, "the rest is history". Thus CSNET was a critical driver in helping NSF get into the networking area and making the transition to the modern Internet. Without CSNET, the modern Internet would not have developed, at least not in the way it did. Curiously, with NSFNET, NSF abandoned its insistence that the research community pay for its own networking. A generation of graduate students grew up thinking networking is free and ought to be free, an attitude that has become part of the spam problem. So ... please put CSNET into your story book. All my best Peter ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- CSNet is never mentioned David Farber (Oct 06)