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Contents  
Foreword by Walter Cronkite  
Introduction - The National Science Foundation at 50: Where Discoveries Begin, by Rita Colwell  
Internet: Changing the Way we Communicate
Advanced Materials: The Stuff Dreams are Made of  
Education: Lessons about Learning  
Manufacturing: The Forms of Things Unknown  
Arabidopsis: Map-makers of the Plant Kingdom  
Decision Sciences: How the Game is Played  
Visualization: A Way to See the Unseen  
Environment: Taking the Long View  
Astronomy: Exploring the Expanding Universe  
Science on the Edge: Arctic and Antarctic Discoveries  
Disaster & Hazard Mitigation  
About the Photographs  
Acknowledgments  
About the NSF  
Chapter Index  
The Internet: Changing the Way We Communicate
 

An End and a Beginning

By 1995, it was clear the Internet was growing dramatically. NSFNET had spurred Internet growth in all kinds of organizations. NSF had spent approximately $30 million on NSFNET, complemented by in-kind and other investments by IBM and MCI. As a result, 1995 saw about 100,000 networks—both public and private—in operation around the country. On April 30 of that year, NSF decommissioned the NSF backbone. The efforts to privatize the backbone functions had been successful, announced Paul Young, then head of NSF's CISE Directorate, and the existing backbone was no longer necessary.

From there, NSF set its sights even higher. In 1993, the Foundation offered a solicitation calling for a new, very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) to be used exclusively for research by selected users. In 1995, Young and his staff worked out a five-year cooperative agreement with MCI to offer the vBNS. That agreement was recently extended to keep the vBNS operating through March 2003. The vBNS has met its goal of pushing transmission speed from its starting point of 155 Mbps to speeds in excess of 2.4 billion bits per second by the turn of the century.

The vBNS originally linked the two NSF supercomputing leading-edge sites that are part of the Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. NSF soon tied in another thirteen institutions. By 2000, the network connected 101 institutions, including 94 of the 177 U.S. universities that have received high-performance computing awards from the Foundation.

"In ensuring that vBNS will be available at least through March 2003, NSF is living up to its Next-Generation Internet commitments while charting the course for new research applications that capitalize on that infrastructure," says NSF's George Strawn. "The new Information Technology Research program—begun in fiscal year 2000—has spurred an overwhelming response of proposals from the academic community, which proves that these tools have become critical to research in science and engineering."

 
     
PDF Version
Overview
A Constellation of Opportunities
A Public Net
From Modest Beginnings
The Launch of NSFNET
An End and a Beginning
Research on Today's Internet
Expectation for the Internet of Tomorrow
Fuzzball: The Innovative Router
Mosaic: The Original Browser
PACI: Computer Partnerships
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