1980

1980


Internet

Landweber’s proposal has many enthusiastic reviewers. At an NSF-sponsored workshop, the idea is revised in a way that both wins approval and opens up a new epoch for NSF itself. The revised proposal includes many more universities. It proposes a three-tiered structure involving ARPANET, a TELENET-based system, and an e-mail only service called PhoneNet. Gateways connect the tiers into a seamless whole. This brings the cost of a site within the reach of the smallest universities. Moreover, NSF agrees to manage CSNET for two years, after which it will turn it over to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which is made up of more than 50 academic institutions.

The National Science Board approves the new plan and funds it for five years at a cost of $5 million. Since the protocols for interconnecting the subnets of CSNET include TCP/IP, NSF becomes an early supporter of the Internet.

NASA has ARPANET nodes, as do many Department of Energy (DOE) sites. Now several Federal agencies support the Internet, and the number is growing.

Research by David Patterson at Berkeley and John Hennessy at Stanford promotes ‘reduced instruction set’ computing. IBM selects the disk operating system DOS, developed by Microsoft, to operate its planned PC.