Timeline milestone
NSFNET becomes a research backbone
From How the Internet Was Built: From Four Computers to a Global Network
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Expansion
NSFNET becomes a research backbone
The U.S. National Science Foundation launched NSFNET to link researchers and supercomputing centres, rapidly broadening access.
ARPANET connected mainly a limited set of defense-related research sites, leaving most university researchers without practical access to the network or to the supercomputing centres the U.S. National Science Foundation had begun funding. NSFNET linked those supercomputing centres together and let regional campus networks connect in, using TCP/IP as its foundation, and it grew far faster than ARPANET because far more universities could justify the connection. Within a few years NSFNET's regional and backbone links carried more traffic than ARPANET itself, effectively becoming the network's new core and setting up the eventual retirement of the original ARPANET backbone in 1990.
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