CSNET
Encyclopedia
The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network that began operation in 1981 in the United States. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science
departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to ARPANET
, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet
. CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation
for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepared the original CSNET proposal, on behalf of a consortium of universities (Georgia Tech
, University of Minnesota
, University of New Mexico
, Oklahoma University, Purdue University
, University of California-Berkeley, University of Utah
, Virginia University
, University of Washington
, University of Wisconsin, and Yale University
).
The US National Science Foundation
(NSF) requested a review from David J. Farber
at the University of Delaware
. Farber assigned the task to his graduate student Dave Crocker who was already active in the development of electronic mail
. The project was deemed interesting but in need of significant refinement. The proposal eventually gained the support of Vinton Cerf and DARPA. In 1980, the NSF awarded $5 million to launch the network.
It was an unusually large project for the NSF at the time.
A stipulation for the award of the contract was that the network needed to become self-sufficient by 1986.
The first management team consisted of Landweber (University of Wisconsin), Farber (University of Delaware), Peter J. Denning
(Purdue University
), Anthony Hearn (RAND Corporation), and Bill Kern from the NSF. Once CSNET was fully operational, the systems and ongoing network operations were transferred to Bolt Beranek and Newman
(BBN) of Cambridge, Massachusetts
by 1984.
By 1981, three sites were connected: University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University. By 1982, 24 sites were connected expanding to 84 sites by 1984, including one in Israel. Soon thereafter, connections were established to computer science departments in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, and Japan. CSNET eventually connected more than 180 institutions.
One of the earliest experiments in free software distribution on a network, netlib
, was available on CSNET.
CSNET was a forerunner of the National Science Foundation Network
(NSFNet) which eventually became a backbone of the Internet
. CSNET operated autonomously until 1989, when it merged with Bitnet
to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking
(CREN). By 1991, the success of the NSFNET and NSF-sponsored regional networks had rendered the CSNET services redundant, and the CSNET network was shutdown in October 1991.
tunnelling technology (Purdue). Initial access was with email relaying, through gateways at Delaware and RAND, over dial-up telephone or X.29/X.25 terminal emulation. Eventually CSNET access added TCP/IP, including running over X.25.
The email relaying service was called Phonenet, after the telephone-specific channel of the MMDF
software developed by Crocker. The CSNET name service allowed manual and automated email address lookup based on various user attributes, such as name, title, or institution. The X.25 tunneling allowed an institution to connect directly to the ARPANET via a commercial X.25 service (Telenet
), by which the institution's TCP/IP traffic would be tunneled to a CSNET computer that acted as a relay between the ARPANET and the commercial X.25 networks. CSNET was developed on Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC) VAX-11
systems using BSD Unix, but it grew to support a variety of hardware and operating system
platforms.
meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, the Internet Society
recognized the pioneering contribution of CSNET by honoring it with the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. Crocker accepted the award on behalf of Landweber and the other principal investigator
s. A recording of the award presentation and acceptance is available.
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to ARPANET
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.
History
Lawrence LandweberLawrence Landweber
Lawrence H. Landweber is John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.He received his bachelor's degree in 1963 at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. at Purdue University in 1967...
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepared the original CSNET proposal, on behalf of a consortium of universities (Georgia Tech
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...
, University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
, University of New Mexico
University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...
, Oklahoma University, Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...
, University of California-Berkeley, University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
, Virginia University
Virginia University
Virginia University could refer to one of several universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a state in the southern United States:* Virginia University of Lynchburg, a historically black university in Lynchburg...
, University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
, University of Wisconsin, and Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
).
The US National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
(NSF) requested a review from David J. Farber
David J. Farber
David J. "Dave" Farber is a professor of Computer Science, noted for his major contributions to programming languages and computer networking. He is currently Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at the School of Computer Science, Heinz College, and Department of...
at the University of Delaware
University of Delaware
The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...
. Farber assigned the task to his graduate student Dave Crocker who was already active in the development of electronic mail
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
. The project was deemed interesting but in need of significant refinement. The proposal eventually gained the support of Vinton Cerf and DARPA. In 1980, the NSF awarded $5 million to launch the network.
It was an unusually large project for the NSF at the time.
A stipulation for the award of the contract was that the network needed to become self-sufficient by 1986.
The first management team consisted of Landweber (University of Wisconsin), Farber (University of Delaware), Peter J. Denning
Peter J. Denning
Peter J. Denning is an American computer scientist, and prolific writer. He is best known for pioneering work in virtual memory, especially for inventing the working-set model for program behavior, which defeated thrashing in operating systems and became the reference standard for all memory...
(Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...
), Anthony Hearn (RAND Corporation), and Bill Kern from the NSF. Once CSNET was fully operational, the systems and ongoing network operations were transferred to Bolt Beranek and Newman
BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies is a high-technology company which provides research and development services. BBN is based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA...
(BBN) of Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
by 1984.
By 1981, three sites were connected: University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University. By 1982, 24 sites were connected expanding to 84 sites by 1984, including one in Israel. Soon thereafter, connections were established to computer science departments in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, and Japan. CSNET eventually connected more than 180 institutions.
One of the earliest experiments in free software distribution on a network, netlib
Netlib
Netlib is a repository of software for scientific computing maintained by AT&T, Bell Laboratories, the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Netlib comprises a large number of separate programs and libraries...
, was available on CSNET.
CSNET was a forerunner of the National Science Foundation Network
National Science Foundation Network
The National Science Foundation Network was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation beginning in 1985 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States...
(NSFNet) which eventually became a backbone of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. CSNET operated autonomously until 1989, when it merged with Bitnet
BITNET
BITNET was a cooperative USA university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University...
to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking
Corporation for Research and Educational Networking
The Corporation for Research and Educational Networking better known as CREN was a non-profit corporation originally composed of the higher education and research organizations participating in BITNET and CSNET. Its corporate name was adopted at the time of the merging of these two networks in 1989...
(CREN). By 1991, the success of the NSFNET and NSF-sponsored regional networks had rendered the CSNET services redundant, and the CSNET network was shutdown in October 1991.
Components
The CSNET project had three primary components: an email relaying service (Delaware and RAND), a name service (Wisconsin), and TCP/IP-over-X.25X.25
X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...
tunnelling technology (Purdue). Initial access was with email relaying, through gateways at Delaware and RAND, over dial-up telephone or X.29/X.25 terminal emulation. Eventually CSNET access added TCP/IP, including running over X.25.
The email relaying service was called Phonenet, after the telephone-specific channel of the MMDF
MMDF
MMDF, the Multichannel Memorandum Distribution Facility, is a message transfer agent , a computer program designed to transmit email.-History:...
software developed by Crocker. The CSNET name service allowed manual and automated email address lookup based on various user attributes, such as name, title, or institution. The X.25 tunneling allowed an institution to connect directly to the ARPANET via a commercial X.25 service (Telenet
Telenet
Telenet was a commercial packet switched network which went into service in 1974. It was the first packet-switched network service that was available to the general public. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lines connecting their computers and local...
), by which the institution's TCP/IP traffic would be tunneled to a CSNET computer that acted as a relay between the ARPANET and the commercial X.25 networks. CSNET was developed on Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
(DEC) VAX-11
VAX-11
The VAX-11 was a family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture . The VAX-11/780 was the first VAX computer.- VAX-11/780 :...
systems using BSD Unix, but it grew to support a variety of hardware and operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
platforms.
Recognition
At the July 2009 Internet Engineering Task ForceInternet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...
meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, the Internet Society
Internet Society
The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 to provide direction in Internet related standards, education, and policy...
recognized the pioneering contribution of CSNET by honoring it with the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. Crocker accepted the award on behalf of Landweber and the other principal investigator
Principal investigator
A principal investigator is the lead scientist or engineer for a particular well-defined science project, such as a laboratory study or clinical trial....
s. A recording of the award presentation and acceptance is available.