So I hope you got from that, that it
wasn't trivial.
It wasn't like somebody just walked out,
and said, hey make a network.
I mean, there were forces, powerful
forces.
The telecom lobbyists that did not want
this to happen.
And we will, we will see these telecom
obvious a couple times.
As we progress through this lecture.
So Larry Smarr and folks that made the
supercomputers convinced congress to
authorized the, the giving of a grant to
build the National Science Foundation's
network.
It was going to use the TCPIP protocol
that the ARPANET had built.
It was supposed to be inclusive, at least
for a research academics.
And it was, you know, research
universities would, we want to get them
connected.
And so our story now leads from the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
to my university, the University of
Michigan.
Now, if you take a look at this, ARPANET
picture that was sort of right before,
well it's 1972.
But if you look at all of the ARPANET
pictures there is a glaring omission, from
my perspective.
Glaring omission on all of these.
I wonder, why aren't we there?' Well,
there's a very good reason why the
University of Michigan is not on any of
the ARPANET pictures.
And that's because we build our own
network.
We build a network using leased lines, a
three-node network between Michigan State
University, University of Michigan, and
Wayne State University.
We were sharing each other's compute
resources.
We were using each other's computers
interactively.
We were playing online multi-user games.
We called them adventure, they were all
based on text.
But they were great fun, and they were
great community building.
We had chat forums, he had all kinds of
things, and we used each other's software.
It was, it was a cool little world.
And the ARPANET wasn't seen by many as all
that significant.
It was kind of an experiment, right.
It was a research project, and we were a
research, we were production.
Merit was production and ARPANET was
research.
So there you go, right.
So there was a lot of these like nascent
networks out there, early days.
And so the University of Michigan sort of
never really was significantly involved in
the ARPANET work.
But the University of Michigan, being a
big university, did want to get a
supercomputer center.
And because of some strategic blunders, as
Doug Van Houweling will soon explain to
you, Michigan didn't get a supercomputer
center.
And so the idea was, is we would do what
it was going to take to get the network,
because that might be more fun.
So Doug Van Houweling at the time was the
chief information officer at the
University of Michigan, having recently
arrived from Carnegie-Mellon University.
And he was also the chief of the Merit
Network, the network that connected our
three schools.
And so they figured that once they didn't
get a supercomputer center, they better
really pull out the stops so that they
would get the NSF net.
And of course they did get the NSF net and
Doug Van Houweling was the principal
investigator for the NSF net starting in
1988.
So, let's let Doug Van Houweling talk to,
tell you the story and I'll be back in a
moment.