[ih] birth of the Internet?

[Louis Mamakos]

The reverse actually happened.  Carrier neutral, commercial
interconnects were already well in operation by the time the
NAP concept came along.

There were carrier neutral exchange points in existence which at
least UUNET, Sprint, PSI and other had in use; these were operated
as a service by MFS Datanet and instigated by some of those initially
connected.  Initial interconnects were 10Mb/s Ethernet and various
other things followed.  For example, MAE-EAST, MAE-WEST.

Later, the NSF instigated these NAP interconnects, which were of
moderate success, depending on who you asked, and the particular
NAP exchange point in question.  MFS expanded the scope of their
interconnection solution and that mostly worked OK.  There was
the NY NAP in New Jersey operated by Sprint and I believe a Chicago
NAP operated by Ameritech at the time.  The latter was ATM based
and I suspect many lessons were learned from that experience.

To some extent, the NAPs were a bit redundant given some public
exchanges that were already in operation.  One of the other drivers
was as a funding source for some of the NSF regional networks for
connections.

There was also another federally funded exchange point or two,
the "FIX" that existed at around this time.  Various agency
networks (DoE, NASA, etc.) were interconnected here and at least
the FIX interconnect on the east coast in Washington was generally
aligned with the MAE-EAST interconnect fabric.

Louis Mamakos

On Oct 28, 2010, at 3:08 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:

> They actually funded the NAPs, as I recall.  It didn't take long for the NAPs to be replaced by the carrier-neutral IXs.
> 
> RB
> 
> On 10/28/2010 11:26 AM, Vint Cerf wrote:
>> NSF program managers also espoused and supported the Network Access
>> Points for interconnection in place of the NSFNET as it was retired in
>> 1995.
>> 
>> v
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 2:00 PM, Dave CROCKER<dhc2 at dcrocker.net>  wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 10/28/2010 10:33 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>>>> Larry Press wrote:
>>>>> Would it be fair to say that NSFNet grew up to be The Internet, where
>>>>> some of
>>>>> the other things being mentioned were experiments or developments in
>>>>> internetworking?
>>>> I think you have to review your timing. The Internet predates the NSFnet
>>>> by
>>>> several years.
>>> 
>>> Right.
>>> 
>>> NSFNet really qualifies as the /final/ stage of development of the Internet,
>>> before fully commercial adoption.
>>> 
>>> It's introduction of an additional backbone forced core changes to the
>>> routing technology, but otherwise it had to do with expanding the Internet
>>> operationally, rather than in 'creating' the Internet.
>>> 
>>> Besides the forcing function on BGP, it's 'innovation' was to seed
>>> organizations that created a commercial core to the public Internet.
>>> 
>>> d/
>>> --
>>> 
>>>  Dave Crocker
>>>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>>>  bbiw.net
>>> 
> 
> -- 
> --
> Richard Bennett
>