By the end of the 1980s the number of hosts connected to the public Internet, a confederation of networks looking much like today’s Internet, would reach a hundred thousand. The 1980s would be a time of tremendous growth. Much of that growth resulted from several distinct efforts to create computer networks linking universities together. BITNET provided e-mail and file transfers among several universities in the Northeast. CSNET (computer science network) was formed to link university researchers who did not have access to ARPAnet. In 1986, NSFNET was created to provide access to NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers. Starting with an initial backbone speed of 56 kbps, NSFNET’s backbone would be running at 1.5 Mbps by the end of the decade and would serve as a primary backbone linking regional networks. In the ARPAnet community, many of the final pieces of today’s Internet architecture were falling into place. January 1, 1983 saw the official deployment of TCP/IP as the new standard host protocol for ARPAnet (replacing the NCP protocol). The transition [RFC 801] from NCP to TCP/IP was a flag day event—all hosts were required to transfer over to TCP/IP as of that day. In the late 1980s, important extensions were made to TCP to implement host-based congestion control [Jacobson 1988]. The DNS, used to map between a human-readable Internet name (for example, gaia.cs.umass.edu) and its 32-bit …show more content…
So, it turned out that our message was the shortest and perhaps the most prophetic message ever, namely “Lo!” as in “Lo and behold!” Earlier that year, I was quoted in a UCLA press release saying that once the network was up and running, it would be possible to gain access to computer utilities from our homes and offices as easily as we gain access to electricity and telephone connectivity. So my vision at that time was that the Internet would be ubiquitous, always on, always available, anyone with any device could connect from any location, and it would be invisible. However, I never anticipated that my 99-year-old mother would use the Internet—and indeed she