University of Michigan was one of the
organizations That made a proposal for a
national supercomputing center. That
Proposal was made just as I arrived at the
University of Michigan at the beginning of
1985. The Michigan proposal had as a, as
its primary hardware artifact a machine
that was built in Japan. And I explained
to my colleagues, my new colleagues, the
University of Michigan having just
arrived, that it was highly unlikely that
the proposal would be funded because I
didn't think, especially in that period
that a Japanese machine would, would make
it past the review process ion he National
Science Foundation. A short while later, I
was visiting the National Science
Foundation and I had gotten to know, not
well, but had gotten to know Eric Locke,
who was then director of the National
Science Foundation. And Eric and I had a
conversation about Michigan's proposal.
And it was clear to me from my
conversation with Eric that there was no
prospect that the Michigan proposal would
be funded. I said to Eric, I said, well,
it occurs to me that what might be even
better for the University of Michigan than
having a supercomputing center, is to run
the network that connects all of the
supercomputing centers together. A while
later, there was a proposal request for
proposals on that network, which later
became known as the National Science
Foundation Network. Yeah, that came I have
become the chairman of the board at
Merritt which is Michigan state wide
network. Merritt had, over the years, in
parallel with the packet switching,
protocol developments that had been
involved in the Arpanet, had developed its
own packet switching network and, so we
knew that the NSF had in mind, a project
that would last about five years and would
in total, require the expenditure of
$15,000,000. As we went through thinking
about how we'd create this proposal, we
realized very rapidly that $15,000,000
would only fund a 56 kilo bit network
which, it was very clear, if it were even
put in place, would rapidly become
overwhelmed by the traffic. And so we
immediately started thinking, well, how
could we expand the envelope for such a
proposal? So I got in touch with Jamie and
said, you know we have this NSF Med
opportunity and we're gonna try to bring
in this [inaudible] into this, would the
state be interested? And Jamie said yes,
get back to me when you sort of fit the
pieces together. Then we went to the IBM
corporation. Because even though IBM, very
much like Merritt didn't have a lot of
credentials in Internet protocol work,
they are a big corporation with lots of
cabibility in building uh-huh,
communications equipment. I had an old
friend who worked for IBM research by the
name of Al Lise. Who's in charge of all of
IBM researches computing facilities, and
I've called Al. And I said Al, this is a
great opportunity, but IBM is going to is,
is not going to be successful here. And I
need your help. And so l sort of rallied
some folks from IBM research, where there
actually was work going on in TCIP
Protocols. And so forth and we had another
meeting. I managed to drag Hans Verner out
to another meeting with IBM and, and Hans
Verner admitted, at the end of that
meeting there are people in IBM that know
something about this and yes, they could
be partners. So, we got tentatively an
agreement from IBM that they would
contribute the hardware and the software
to create the routing structure for the
network. But we still needed the
communications facilities. And at that
time, the CFO at IBM was a gentleman. I
think I remember the name correctly by,
his last name was Crow. And, so through
IBM, we went to him and he had contacts
with a former IBM employee who is now the,
network, the chief technical officer, and
essentially the chief network operations
officer for MCI. His name was Dick
[inaudible]. And so IBM approache d Dick
[inaudible], asked him if MCI would be
interested in providing the communications
facilities for this network. Well, as you
may recall at that time, MCI was this
fledgling organization. Some people would
describe it really as, as a law office,
trying to create an environment where they
can actually offer telecommunication
services up against AT&T's lobbying
efforts. They, they have just been
successful in that they were establishing
facilities across the United States and,
and Dick [inaudible] saw this as an
opportunity to sort of move MCI into the
big time. To be part of this NSF net
proposal. And so we wound up with an
agreement, that we would file a joint
proposal with Merritt as the principal
organization. In partnership with IBM, who
had built all the routing hardware and
software and with NCI, who would provide
the nationwide communications facilities.
And while we were and, then we got
Governor Blanchard to commit a million
dollars a year from state funds, in
addition. So we wound up being able to
submit a proposal to the National Science
Foundation I think for something like 14.7
million dollars, because we knew the
sealing was fifteen. But in fact by
including all this in kind activity, it
was actually more like a $55,000,000
proposal and it wasn't. Designed to be 56
kilobits. It was designed to start at T1
or 1.5 megabits. With planned upgrades
over the, over the period of the network,
networks live. We've subsequently learned
that the proposal was received with
considerable skepticism by the reviewers
of the National Science Foundation because
Merritt did not have a strong history in
TCP IP and IBM was thought was the enemy
of the internet, it was then focused on
its own propitiatory protocols and, and so
people really wondered about our technical
ability to pull this off, but the, that
review was conducted without reference to
the actual funding pattern. And then when
the wraps got pulled off of the amount of
resou rce that was being committed by the
partners to this proposal, it immediately
went to the top of the list at the NSF,
and. And I think we always had a notion
that it could be a big deal. We didn't
know for sure, because from the time that
we turned this network on, in 88 until
about 1994, the network traffic, the
number of hosts on the network, all of
this grew by, at the rate of about fifteen
percent a month. So this, this net. This,
this network literally exploded underneath
us. And we were extremely fortunate that
the protocol suite, the TCP IP Protocol
Suite and the fundamental notions of the
network. Allowed it. To grow at that rate.
And, but we had to do a lot of innovation.
The border gateway protocols had to be
developed to allow multiple networks to
interact with one another. And we have to
build increasingly more capable routing
and communications facilities. Finally in.
I think it was around 1990 this network
was growing so fast that it was clear that
these T1 circuits were not going to, were
not going to enable what we needed to do.
So we had to go to the next step which was
DS3 or from 1-1/2 megabits to 45 megabits,
which was a very large step, a 30 fold
increase in capacity. And, in order to do
that, we, wound up creating another, not
for profit organization called Advanced
Network and Services. Merritt was still
the principal investigator on the grant.
But it subcontracted, the development of,
this new network, this 45, megabit network
to Advanced Network and Services, which
was headquartered in Armonk . The NSF net
was the fastest internet, network to the
end. It finally was the commissioned in,
1995, when the congress decided that the
Federal government should not be in the
business of supporting something, that by
that time, in their view, should have
been, become a commercial facility. I'll
not ever forget sitting in a house hearing
room in the capitol. And next to Mitch
Kapor and some Internet some small
internet company, start up CEOs who were
complaining, to the congress that it was
inappropriate for, the NSF net to be
funded by, by the National Science
Foundation when they could provide the
service, as a commercial service. At the
very same time they were making that
complaint, they were using NSF net as,
their, backup network, to carry traffic,
when their much less reliable networks
failed on a national scale. Mci of course
turned out to be a major Internet Service
Provider also using the same technology.
In a classic innovator's curse moment, IBM
who was at that time the leader in routing
technology for, internet for internet
backbones, managed to decide that they
should kill all of the work they have done
in developing these routers because it
would threaten their proprietary network
efforts. It's probably almost single
handedly responsible for the fact that
Cisco became the dominant router, company
in the United States rather than IBM.