So, as you can see, none of this is easy.
It wasn't easy for Larry Smar and now we
basically have the lobbyists it once
again.
Lobbyists are deciding that there's only
going to be 15 million dollars.
Because if it's 15 million dollars, they
can only build a 56 kilobit line.
But Michigan thought outside the box, some
people might say we cheated.
Other universities wanted to get the
grant, kind of thought we did cheat.
We didn't play by the rules, like in Star
Trek, we rewrote the rules.
So, we got it.
And we slid underneath the nose of AT&T, a
one and a half megabit network that
started, started large and it started fast
and got faster.
And, as Doug talked, it was a very, very,
very successful network and it, it, it
didn't, it had follow on effects just like
Larry talked about.
It had these follow on effects causing
campuses to build networking because in
would come this really fast, national
network so you'd better fix the on campus
networking.
So it was really quite wonderful.
And the partners, IBM, and MCI.
The other thing is, AT&T was being beat up
by MCI at the time, and maybe they weren't
noticing.
So we might have been lucky.
It could easily have been two years
earlier, or two years later it might not
have worked.
So, whatever.
It did work.
And, and we can be very grateful.
So the, University of Michigan.
Was sort of the center of, they were in
the network operations patients center and
did the network design, worked on the
software with IBM, and built the network.
And, it had a very exponential growth as
it went forward.
This building right here is on our north
campus, and it was for me personally the
very first place that I typed.
The 1st characters that went across the
internet, I walked in this door to, I
wasn't at the university at that time, but
I had friends here and so I came in and I
was typing you know, hello, on the
internet.
And so, this building was where the
network operations center was and where I,
I touched the internet for the and the NSF
net for the 1st time.
So, it started out real simple.
But it's goal, it's goal was to enable
connections to other networks.
The regional networks got formed, Larry
Smar mentioned that.
And so then the backbone became sort of a
forcing function.
Get more campuses on and more and more
states, etcetera, etcetera.
Now, one of the things that was quite
interesting is we in the academic field
had the right to use this network.
But when it first started out, it was
supposed to be academic only.
And then once it was established in the
late 80s and early 90s, there were some
people that started sort of like, bending
those rules or bypassing those rules or
ignoring those rules, and it wasn't really
clear who was supposed to police those
rules.
And the people like at the University of
Michigan, they, their heart wasn't in
reducing who would use the internet.
They wanted to expand, right?
And so there were places, often bulletin
board systems would somehow get a
connection to the internet and they would
give internet access to a bunch of
nonacademics.
And so it became Increasingly in the late
80s understood by everyone around the
world.
But this is pretty much nerds, right, that
can sit with a screen with a command lined
interface with a text based screen, and
they can get excited about that.
I'm, I'm like that, I can get excited
about things that are non-graphical
because I just make it up in my head.
But we needed something to pop this into
the collective consciousnes of all
humanity, rather than just acedemics
first, and then nerds second.
But, that was about to change.