1984 - 1990
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1984
The ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to
serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research
component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks.
Upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines,1.5 Mbps
which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide
advanced routers and Merit would manage the network. New network was to be
called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to
remain called CSNET.
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1985
The National Science Foundation began deploying its new T1 lines, which would be finished by 1988.
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1986
The Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF was created to serve as a forum for technical coordination by contractors for DARPA working on ARPANET, US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway system.
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1987
BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN), another work of the National Science Foundation.
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1988
Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again.
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1990
(Updated 8/2001) Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not for profit corporation
called ANS, Advanced Network & Services, which was to conduct research into
high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps
line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its
sites were connected by this new backbone.
While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded
the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines
of ARPANET were taken out of service.
Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide
efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy
physics community.
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