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

Thu Dec 18 10:22:12 PST 2025

I think an interesting question is " *Why* did UCAR have the contract from
NSF to operate (oversee) CSNET?" It is my understanding that NSF wanted to
award a contract to BBN (because BBN was already operating ARPAnet) to
operate CSNET, but that NSF rules did not allow giving (or made it
extremely difficult to give) a contract to a commercial company to build or
operate anything; NSF's charter was to sponsor research at "research
institutions."  UCAR was a "research institution" that already was
receiving NSF funding and was agreeable to do networking research for NSF
by writing a contract to a commercial company after going through the
official procurement process of soliciting and evaluating proposals. Being
from BBN, I like to believe BBN's proposal to UCAR was the best on its
merits, but it is possible selection pressure was exhibited by NSF; maybe
someone closer to the process can explain more.  But I assume NSF had
several institutions other than UCAR that could have been asked to work on
this problem, so the above summary of the procedure doesn't answer the "Why
UCAR?" question.

Cheers,
Alex

On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 12:55 PM Alex McKenzie <amckenzie3 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> *From:* Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> *To:* Guy Almes <galmes at tamu.edu>
> *Cc:* "internet-history at elists.isoc.org" <internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >
> *Sent:* Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 12:10:20 PM EST
> *Subject:* Re: [ih] History from 1960s to 2025 (role of NCAR and other
> labs)
>
> 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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