From NSF to ISP

1995 was the year that ISPs became the dominant gateway to the
information superhighway. But how’d we go from ARPANET all the
way to that? It turns out, none of it would have happened without
a team of intrepid engineers at the University of Michigan.

Marc Weber tells us how a tension between academics and the
military set the next evolution of the ARPANET. Douglas Van
Houweling discusses the work his MERIT team did at the University
of Michigan to build the national backbone of the NSFNET. Elise
Gerich, MERIT’s systems manager, talks about how they made the
leap from a T1 connection to a T3 to handle traffic from their
growing network. And Janet Abbate emphasizes how all this set the
stage for the commercialized internet that birthed the dot-com
boom in 1995.


If you want to read up on some of our research on the NSFNET, you
can check out all our bonus material over at
redhat.com/commandlineheroes. Follow along with the episode
transcript.