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

[Craig Partridge]

UCAR had the contract from NSF to operate CSNET (stated perhaps more
clearly, CSNET, predecessor /partial-prototype to NSF regionals, was
overseen by UCAR).
Craig

On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 9:54 AM Guy Almes via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
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