The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a crucial wide-area network sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1985. It soon replaced ARPANET and became the primary government network linking universities and research facilities. NSFNET was eventually decommissioned in 1995 and replaced with the commercial internet backbone.
My name is Dave Levine, and I acquired NSF.net on March 30, 2022. I’m incredibly honored to own NSF.net. It’s a unique asset and an essential piece of internet history that I hope to take care of for years to come.
The domain history for NSF.net can be found here. Additional information on NSFNET and its impact can be found here.
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) created the first high-speed backbone in 1987. It was called NSFNET, and it was a T1 line that connected 170 smaller networks and operated at 1.544 Mbps (million bits per second). IBM, MCI, and Merit worked with NSF to create the backbone and developed a T3 (45 Mbps) backbone the following year. Today many companies operate their own high-capacity backbones, and all of them interconnect at various NAPs around the world. The entire Internet is a gigantic, sprawling agreement between companies to intercommunicate freely. In this way, everyone on the Internet can talk to everyone else on the planet, no matter where they are and what company they use.
Mosaic was the first freely available Web browser to allow Web pages to include both graphics and text, which was developed in 1993 by students and staff working at the NSF-supported National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In less than 18 months, NCSA Mosaic became the Web “browser of choice” for more than a million users and set off an exponential growth in the number of Web servers and Web surfers. Mosaic was the progenitor of modern browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
The history of NSFNET and NSF’s supercomputing centers also overlapped with the rise of personal computers and the launch of the World Wide Web in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland. The NSF centers developed many tools for organizing, locating, and navigating through information, including one of the first widely used Web server applications.
