HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network that began operation in 1981 in the United States. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (including ...
departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to
ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet. CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.


History

Lawrence Landweber at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...
prepared the original CSNET proposal, on behalf of a consortium of universities (
Georgia Tech The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public university, public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia (U.S. state), Ge ...
,
University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United Stat ...
, University of New Mexico,
University of Oklahoma , mottoeng = "For the benefit of the Citizen and the State" , type = Public research university , established = , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $2.7billion (2021) , pr ...
,
Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and mone ...
,
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant ...
, University of Utah,
University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective a ...
,
University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle ...
,
University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...
, and
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...
). The US National Science Foundation (NSF) requested a review from David J. Farber at the University of Delaware. Farber assigned the task to his graduate student Dave Crocker who was already active in the development of electronic mail. The project was deemed interesting but in need of significant refinement. The proposal eventually gained the support of Vinton Cerf and
DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...
. In 1980, the NSF awarded $5 million to launch the network. It was an unusually large project for the NSF at the time. A stipulation for the award of the contract was that the network needed to become self-sufficient by 1986. The first management team consisted of Landweber (University of Wisconsin), Farber (University of Delaware), Peter J. Denning (
Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and mone ...
), Anthony C. Hearn (
RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed ...
), and Bill Kern from the NSF. Once CSNET was fully operational, the systems and ongoing network operations were transferred to a team led by Richard Edmiston at
Bolt Beranek and Newman Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brow ...
(BBN) of
Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...
by 1984. The Purdue team, consisting of Peter Denning, Douglas Comer, and Paul McNabb, was responsible for designing and building the kernel interfaces that would allow sites outside of the ARPANET infrastructure to connect via public X.25 networks, such as
Telenet Telenet was an American commercial packet-switched network which went into service in 1975. It was the first FCC-licensed public data network in the United States. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lines ...
. The mechanism allowed systems with TCP/IP network stacks to use an X.25 network device, with IP datagrams being sent through dynamically allocated X.25 sessions. Purdue and other sites with ARPANET access would act as gateways into the ARPANET, allowing non-ARPANet sites to have email, telnet, ftp, and other forms of network access directly into the ARPANET. By 1981, three sites were connected: University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University. By 1982, 24 sites were connected expanding to 84 sites by 1984, including one in Israel. Soon thereafter, connections were established to computer science departments in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, and Japan. CSNET eventually connected more than 180 institutions. One of the earliest experiments in free software distribution on a network, netlib, was available on CSNET. CSNET was a forerunner of the
National Science Foundation Network The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The p ...
(NSFNet) which eventually became a backbone of the Internet. CSNET operated autonomously until 1989, when it merged with Bitnet to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN). By 1991, the success of the NSFNET and NSF-sponsored regional networks had rendered the CSNET services redundant, and the CSNET network was shut down in October 1991.


Components

The CSNET project had three primary components: an email relaying service (Delaware and RAND), a name service (Wisconsin), and
TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the su ...
-over- X.25 tunnelling technology (Purdue). Initial access was with email relaying, through gateways at Delaware and RAND, over dial-up telephone or X.29/X.25 terminal emulation. Eventually CSNET access added TCP/IP, including running over X.25. The email relaying service was called Phonenet, after the telephone-specific channel of the MMDF software developed by Crocker. The CSNET
name service In computing, a directory service or name service maps the names of network resources to their respective network addresses. It is a shared information infrastructure for locating, managing, administering and organizing everyday items and network ...
allowed manual and automated email address lookup based on various user attributes, such as name, title, or institution. The X.25 tunneling allowed an institution to connect directly to the ARPANET via a commercial X.25 service (
Telenet Telenet was an American commercial packet-switched network which went into service in 1975. It was the first FCC-licensed public data network in the United States. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lines ...
), by which the institution's TCP/IP traffic would be tunneled to a CSNET computer that acted as a relay between the ARPANET and the commercial X.25 networks. CSNET also developed dialup-on-demand (Dialup IP) software to automatically initiate or disconnect SLIP sessions as needed to remote locations. CSNET was developed on
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...
(DEC)
VAX-11 The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In a ...
systems using BSD Unix, but it grew to support a variety of hardware and
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
platforms.


Recognition

At the July 2009
Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and ...
meeting in
Stockholm, Sweden Stockholm () is the capital and largest city of Sweden as well as the largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people live in the municipality, with 1.6 million in the urban area, and 2.4 million in the metropolit ...
, the
Internet Society The Internet Society (ISOC) is an American nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1992 with local chapters around the world. Its mission is "to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people ...
recognized the pioneering contribution of CSNET by honoring it with the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. Crocker accepted the award on behalf of Landweber and the other
principal investigator In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often us ...
s. A recording of the award presentation and acceptance is available.


References


External links


Living Internet: CSNet


See also

*
National Science Foundation Network The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The p ...
{{American research and education networks Experimental computer networks Wide area networks History of the Internet Academic computer network organizations 1981 in computing 1980s in computing 1991 in computing Computer-related introductions in 1981 1981 establishments in the United States 1991 disestablishments in the United States