History of the Internet and Internet2

Circa 1969	The Department of Defense creates ARPAnet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency network. It connected four sites including the Stanford Research Institute, two University of California campuses at UCLA and UCSB, and the University of Utah.
1983	TCP/IP becomes the standard protocol. The military needed research partners so the government granted university access to ARPAnet. The standard protocol enabled dissimilar and regional IP networks to connect, and the ARPAnet became known as the Internet.
mid-1980s	The National Science Foundation (NSF) began developing a high-speed backbone between its supercomputer centers. In 1987, non-commercial traffic passed the NSFnet, with schools and research organizations being the largest users. The NSF-sponsored very-high-performance Backbone Network Service became known as vBNS.
1995	The Internet was privatized with MCI WorldCom holding a 5-year vBNS contract. Hyperlinks and Mosaic spur growth.
1995-1996	Higher education sees the commodity traffic highlighting some of the problems of the Internet. Internet2 is formed to provide priority status and responsiveness to higher education and research organizations. Internet2 members dub the Internet, "the commodity Internet".
October 1996	Internet2 Project formed (34 universities)
January 1997	First Internet2 Member Meeting
October 1997	UCAID formed The U.S. Government forms the NGI Initiative
April 1998	Abilene Project announced
September 1998	Middleware Initiative announced
January 1999	Abilene in production

Notes

Abilene is an advanced backbone network that supports the development and deployment of the new applications being developed within the Internet2 community. Abilene connects regional network aggregation points, called gigaPoPs, to support the work of Internet2 universities as they develop advanced Internet applications. Abilene complements other high-performance research networks.
The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) is a non-profit consortium, led by university members working in partnership with corporate and affiliate members, to provide leadership and direction for advanced networking development.
The U.S. government need for better quality-of-service spawned the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative. The NGI initiative is a multi-agency Federal research and development (R&D) program that is developing advanced networking technologies, developing revolutionary applications that require advanced networking, and demonstrating these capabilities on test beds that are 100 to 1,000 times faster end-to-end than today's Internet.
The university-led Internet2 and the federally led NGI are parallel and complementary initiatives based in the United States. Internet2 and NGI are already working together in many areas. For example, through participation in a NSF NGI program, over 150 Internet2 universities have received competitively awarded grants to support connections to advanced backbone networks such as Abilene and the very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS). Internet2 is also forming partnerships with similar advanced networking initiatives around the world. Working together will help ensure a cohesive and interoperable advanced networking infrastructure for research and education, and the continued interoperability of the global Internet.

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Last modified: Jun 02, 2005, 09:51 EDT