The geek old days, when domain names were free and IPv4 ruled the land

November 30, 2007 10:27 AM

Remember NSFNet? If you had an email account in the U.S. before 1995, chances are most of your mail passed through an NSFNet node. The folks who ran it are having a reunion.

Starting in 1986, NSFNET ran the interconnection between research, industry, education and government. It started by joining supercomputers and regional networks across the country through a data backbone running at a whopping 56 kilobits per second (then 25 times faster than anybody else), later increasing speed and quantity of data as demand increased but still directing ever-escalating traffic through a limited set of access points. On April 30, 1995, The NSFNET backbone was changed to a new architecture of private networks joined through peering points, marking the end of an era. More history from the National Science Foundation and Wikipedia.

posted by ardgedee (4 comments total)

I prefer NSFWnet.
posted by dersins at 10:52 AM on November 30, 2007

I find this sort of early-Internet-history profoundly interesting, I suppose because I basically failed to pay any attention to it the first time around. Neat post.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:58 AM on November 30, 2007

Ah, the good(?) old days when 100kB was a big transfer you might want to schedule for off-peak hours, and AUPs forbade any commercial activity. :)
posted by hattifattener at 12:53 PM on November 30, 2007

I don't know why you'd want to hang out with the guys who blew up the Statue of Liberty.
posted by Partial Law at 10:04 PM on November 30, 2007