CSNet is never mentioned

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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

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