How the Net Was Won: Michigan Built the Budding Internet

Michigan at the Forefront

Van Houweling was hired in late 1984 as the University of Michigan’s first vice-provost for information technology. Michigan Engineering Dean James Duderstadt and Associate Dean Daniel Atkins had fought to create the position, and to bring in Van Houweling, believing it critical to the University’s efforts to solidify and extend its already substantial computer standing.

The transformative power of computing would begin to gain credence by the 1960s, but the University of Michigan was at the forefront of the movement a full decade earlier. In 1953 its Michigan Digital Automatic Computer (MIDAC)—designed and built to help solve complex military problems—was only the sixth university-based high-speed electronic digital computer in the country, and the first in the Midwest. And in 1956 the legendary Arthur Burks—co-creator of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC; considered the world’s first computer)—had established at Michigan one of the nation’s first computer science programs.

Michigan also became involved in the U.S. Department of Defense CONCOMP project, which focused on the CONversational use of COMPuters (hence the name), and by the mid-1960s the University of Michigan had established the Michigan Terminal System (MTS)—one of the world’s first time-sharing computer systems, and a pioneer in early forms of email, file-sharing and conferencing. In 1966 the University of Michigan (along with Michigan State University and Wayne State University) also created the Michigan Educational Research Information Triad (MERIT; now referred to as Merit), which was funded by the NSF and the State of Michigan to connect all three of those universities’ mainframe computers.

And it was Merit—with Van Houweling as its chairman—that would be critical in securing this latest NSF grant to rescue the sputtering NSFNET.

The NSF had encouraged NSFNET upgrade respondents to involve members of the private sector, but nobody needed to tell that to Van Houweling. As Merit’s chairman, Van Houweling already had been cajoling his well-established contacts at IBM, who in turn convinced MCI—an upstart telecommunications company looking to make a name for itself in the wake of the breakup of the AT&T monopoly—to join the fold. IBM committed to providing hardware and software, as well as network management, while MCI would provide transmission circuits for the NSFNET backbone at reduced rates. With these commitments in place, Gov. James Blanchard agreed to contribute $1 million per year over five years from the state’s Michigan Strategic Fund.

And the bid was won.

Now the team would need to build an extensive and upgraded infrastructure, using newer and more sophisticated networking hardware of a type never used before—and it would have to do it fast.

The first generation NSFNET had employed a University of Delaware faculty-produced router—the device that forwards data among networks. That original router was nicknamed the Fuzzball, and ran at 56 kilobits per second. But the next generation was supposed to run at 1.5 megabits per second—or nearly 30 times faster.

“A whole different category,” says Van Houweling, “and nothing like that existed. Today, you can buy a router for your house for about $50 to $100. But there were no routers to speak of then. You could buy one—for about a half million. But IBM committed to build it and write the software—for free!”

MCI’s Richard Liebhaber later recalled, during a 2007 NSFNET 20th anniversary celebration, how quickly things were moving—and how much more there was to learn. “All this baloney about, ‘We knew what we were doing,’” said Liebhaber. “When we committed to this, we didn’t have anything. We had ideas, but that was about it.”

But somehow, it all worked.

Merit committed to making the new backbone operational by August 1988, and it accomplished that feat by July of that year—just eight months after the award. The newer, faster NSFNET connected 13 regional networks and supercomputer centers, representing more than 170 constituent campus networks. This upgraded network of networks experienced an immediate surge in demand of 10 percent the first month—a growth rate that would hold firm year after year.

“At first we thought it was just pent-up demand, and it would level off,” says Van Houweling. “But no!”

Merit had exceeded its own early expectations—though Aupperle modestly attributed that to “the incredible interest in networks by the broader academic communities” rather than to the new network’s speed and reliability. But the results were indisputable. With an operations center that operated nonstop, Merit’s staff expanded from 30 to 65 and overflowed into a series of trailers behind the North Campus computing center.

Craig Labovitz was a newly hired Merit engineer who had abandoned his PhD studies in artificial intelligence at Michigan because he was so fascinated by his at-first-temporary NSFNET work assignment. “Most people today don’t know that the heart of the Internet was once on North Campus,” says Labovitz. “It was where the operations and on-call center was, and where all the planning and the engineering took place.” Labovitz—who put to productive use the expertise he gleaned during his NSFNET tenure—now operates DeepField, an Ann Arbor-based cloud and network infrastructure management company.

The NSFNET soon proved to be the fastest and most reliable network ever. The new NSFNET technology quickly replaced the Fuzzball. The ARPANET was phased out in 1990. And by 1991 the CSNET wasn’t needed anymore, either, because all the computer scientists were connecting to the NSFNET. As the first large-scale, packet switched backbone network infrastructure in the United States, almost all traffic from abroad was traversing the NSFNET as well, and its most fundamental achievement—construction of a high-speed network service that evolved to T1 speeds (1.5 megabits per seconds) and later to T3 speeds (45 megabits per second)—would essentially cover the world.

“Throughout this whole period, it was all about the need to support university research that drove this project,” says Van Houweling. “Researchers needed to have access to these supercomputing facilities, and the way to do it was to provide them with this network. Nobody had the notion that we were building the communications infrastructure of the future.”

But that’s the way it turned out.

The Protocol Wars

To the extent that any one or more individuals are said to have “invented” the Internet, credit generally goes to American engineers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. Along with their team at DARPA in the mid-1960s, Cerf and Kahn developed (based on concepts created by Louis Pouzin for the French CYCLADES project) and later implemented the TCP/IP protocols for the ARPANET. The TCP/IP protocols were also referred to as “open” protocols—and later, simply, as the Internet protocols. (Cerf also may have been the first to refer to a connected computer network as an “internet”—though the “Internet” would not fully come to the attention of the general public for another two decades.)

The significance of the NSFNET’s success was not just that it scaled readily and well, but that it did so using the open protocols during a time of stress and transition.

The open protocols had proved popular among computer scientists accustomed to using the ARPANET and the CSNET, but they still were relatively new and untested. As the NSF considered the NSFNET’s standards, there remained deep skepticism—and perhaps no small amount of self-interest—among commercial providers that the open protocols could effectively scale. Every interested corporate enterprise was pressing for its own protocols.

“There was a race underway between the commercial interests trying to propagate their proprietary protocols, and the open protocols from the DARPA work,” says Daniel Atkins, now professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science at Michigan Engineering and a professor emeritus of information at the School of Information. “AT&T had intended to be the provider of the Internet.”

“Once the NSF made the [NSFNET upgrade] award, AT&T’s lobbyists stormed the NSF offices and tried to persuade them that this was a terrible idea,” says Van Houweling.

The NSFNET’s immediate challenge, therefore, was to avoid a flameout, explains Van Houweling. Getting overrun would have given this open model “a black eye”—enabling the telecommunications and computing companies to “rush in and say, ‘See, this doesn’t work. We need to go back to the old system where each of us manages our own network.’”

But as Aupperle noted, “those networks weren’t talking to each other.” Proprietary protocols installed in the products of Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, and other computer manufacturers at that time were hierarchical, closed systems. Their models were analogous to the telephone model, with very little intelligence at the devices, and all decisions and intelligence residing at the center—whereas the Internet protocols have an open, distributed nature. The power is with the end-user—not the provider—with the intelligence at the edges, within each machine.

“AT&T’s model was top-down management and control. They wouldn’t have done what the NSFNET did,” says Van Houweling. Unlike their proprietary counterparts, open protocols weren’t owned by anyone—which meant that no one was charging fees or royalties. And that anyone could use them.

As it happened, “adoption of the open protocols of the NSFNET went up exponentially, and it created what we would now call a viral effect, where everybody wanted it, including [eventually] the commercial world,” says Atkins. “It met the need and swamped the competition.”

But the battle over proprietary standards would not be won easily or quickly. Before the open protocols could definitively prove their feasibility, a prominent competing effort in Europe to build and standardize a different set of proprietary network protocols—the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI)—was continuing to garner support not just from the telecommunications industry but also from the U.S. government. This debate wouldn’t fully and finally end for at least a decade—or until the end of the 1990s.

Until the upgraded NSFNET started to gain traction, “everything had been proprietary. Everything had been in stovepipes,” says Van Houweling. “There had never been a network that had the ability to not only scale but to also connect pretty much everything.”

“It was the first time in the history of computing that all computers spoke the same language,” recalled IBM’s Allan Weis at the NSFNET 20th anniversary. “If [a manufacturer] wanted to sell to universities or to a research institution that talked to a university, [it] had to have TCP/IP on the computer.”

Proprietary protocols “had a control point,” Weis added. “They were controlled by somebody; owned by somebody. TCP/IP was beautiful in that you could have thousands of autonomous networks that no one owned, no one controlled, just interconnecting and exchanging traffic.”

And it was working.

The Bumpy Road to Commerce

But continued growth would bring change, and change would bring controversy.

“When the NSFNET was turned on, there was an explosion of traffic, and it never turned off,” says Van Houweling. Merit had a wealth of experience, and along with MCI and IBM it had for more than two years exceeded all expectations. But Merit was a nonprofit organization created as a state-based enterprise. To stay ahead of the traffic the NSFNET would have to upgrade again—from T1 to T3. No one had ever built a T3 network before.

“To do this, you had to have an organization that was technically very strong, and was run with the vigor of industry,” reasoned Weis. This would require more funding, which was not likely to come from the NSF.

In September 1990, the NSFNET team announced the creation of a new, independent nonprofit corporation—Advanced Network & Services, Inc. (ANS), with Van Houweling as its chairman. With $3 million investments from MCI, IBM and Northern Telecom, ANS subcontracted the network operation from Merit, and the new T3 backbone service was online by late 1991. The T3 service represented a 30-fold increase in bandwidth—and took twice as long as the T1 network to complete.

At this point the NSFNET still was servicing only the scientific community. Once the T3 network was installed, however—and some early bumps smoothed over—commercial entities were seeking access as well. ANS created a for-profit subsidiary to enable commercial traffic, but charged commercial users rates in excess of its costs so that the surplus could be used for infrastructure and other network improvements.

But several controversies soon arose. Regional networks desired commercial entities as customers for the same reasons that ANS did, but felt constrained by the NSF’s Acceptable Use Policy, which prohibited purely commercial traffic (i.e., not directly supporting research and education) from being conveyed over the NSFNET backbone.

Even though non-academic organizations willing to pay commercial prices were largely being denied NSFNET access, the research and education community nonetheless raised concerns about how commercialization would affect the price and quality of its own connections. And on yet another front, commercial entities in the fledgling Internet Service Provider market complained that the NSF was unfairly competing with them through its ongoing financial support of the NSFNET.

Inquiries into these matters—including Congressional hearings and an internal report by the inspector general of the NSF—ultimately resulted in federal legislation in 1992 that somewhat expanded the extent to which commercial traffic was allowed on the NSFNET.

But the NSF always understood that the network would have to be supported by commerce if it were going to last. It never intended to run the NSFNET indefinitely. Thus a process soon commenced whereby regional networks became, or were purchased by, commercial providers. In 1994 the core of ANS was sold to America Online (now AOL), and in 1995 the NSF decided to decommission the NSFNET backbone.

And the NSFNET was history.

Van Houweling is fond of saying the Internet could only have been invented at a university because academics comprise “the only community that understands that great things can happen when no one’s in charge.”

“The communications companies that resisted did so on the basis that there was no control,” Van Houweling says. “From its own historical perspective, this looked like pure chaos—and unmanageable.”

Labovitz agrees. “It was an era of great collaboration because it was a non-commercial effort. You were pulling universities together, so there were greater levels of trust than there might have been among commercial parties.”

So what would the Internet look like today if it had gone AT&T’s way? One possible scenario is that the various commercial providers may well have created a network in silos, with tiered payments depending on the type of content, the content creator and the intended consumer—without the unlimited information sharing.

“It’s hard to predict precisely what would have happened,” Atkins admits, but instead of being “open and democratizing,” it might have been “a balkanized world,” with “a much more closed environment, segmented among telecommunications companies.”