[ih] History from 1960s to 2025 (role of NCAR and other labs)

[Guy Almes]

Jack,
   This is all so valuable.  It touches on the community to be 
connected, but aims primarily at the evolution of technical foundations.
   I'm going to aim at the community part, based in part on a recent 
news story.

On 12/17/25 5:17 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> The January/February 2026 issue of Foreign Affairs contains an article
> titled "How China Wins The Future".  ...
> 
> Here's my thoughts -- based of course only on my personal experience.
> I'd love to know what I got wrong or missed.
> 
> - 1960s: Licklider creates his vision of Intergalactic Network; ARPA
> creates the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which
> initiates the creation of ARPANET.
Note that it starts with a community to be connected.  For Licklider, it 
was ARPA and the community of scientists funded by ARPA.  This could be 
trivialized by focusing on the menagerie of computer terminals and 
modems that Lick had to log in to various computers, but it was surely 
deeper.  One historic healthy outcome of the postwar United States was 
the rise of systematic federal funding of science.  Whether researchers 
in various fields were aware of it, there was a rapidly emerging science 
community that shared federal funding, but also shared a growing need 
for effective collaboration among scientists in various disciplines and 
various localities.
   Reflecting on the impact of this on the American and international 
university research communities, I'd sometimes playfully note that the 
US research university community was actually a very odd highly 
decentralized organization.
   (At a meeting of networking leaders in Ireland circa 2001, a speaker 
noted that there were elements of this present in the medieval 
university world.  Patterns such as sending your best students to get 
their advanced degrees in other universities and such as everyone 
speaking a common second language (Latin then, English now), were 
significant.  But I'll return to the special energy behind the postwar 
situation.)
   One special player in this is NCAR.
   I am not an expert on NCAR and would very much like to hear from 
others who know more about the role it played and is playing.

   In 1987, when I was at Rice University cobbling together one of the 
NSFnet-related "regional networks", we were suffering from a highly 
congested 56kb/s ARPAnet while waiting for the promised T1-based NSFnet 
Backbone.  So, to complement our ARPAnet connection, NSF kindly set up a 
56kb/s connection of the prototype Fuzzball-based NSFnet backbone.  The 
specific connection was to the backbone node at NCAR in Boulder, 
Colorado.  I had not been aware of NCAR much, but as this intense period 
of Internet building continued, I became more and more aware of it.
   Evidently, NCAR was a creature of UCAR, the University Corporation 
for Atmospheric Research.  UCAR, in turn, was a creature of atmospheric 
science departments from across the country.  I do not pretend to 
understand the bureaucratic details, but a few things were clear:
<> these departments and researchers had a deep need to share data, 
computational resources, and other infrastructure, even acting on this 
in 1960, when computer networks were not on the horizon.
<> NCAR has a neat campus "sort of" in Boulder, but on the top of a mesa 
and not even convenient to get at from Boulder, never mind any other 
university in the country.  Its physical situation almost cried out for 
a network.
<> It served as a sort of NSF Supercomputer Center even before there was 
an NSF Supercomputer Center program, even anticipating the 1983 Lax Report.
<> It seemed to have deeply understood the strategic value of 
collaboration among atmospheric science departments at a large number of 
universities.
<> Among other things, this meant that NCAR was a natural contributor 
and beneficiary of the use of computing and computer networking in 
connecting a nationwide and worldwide atmospheric science community.
<> It also fostered the UCAR Unidata project, which used the Internet to 
share atmospheric data across universities and labs across the country.
<> I suspect that the 1950s International Geophysical Year had a role in 
creating UCAR and NCAR.  Oh, and also Sputnik, but that's another story.

   Let me stop there.
   My narrow request is for a better understanding of how NCAR emerged 
and how it began to contribute to networking even before any modern 
computer networks existed.
   My broader request is for other examples of how specific scientific 
communities with their need for effective collaboration and sharing of 
data and resources helped create the motivation for building the 
Internet, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s.  So community pull as a 
complement to our usual story of technology push.
	-- Guy