An article –The Team That Put the Net in Orbit – in today’s NY Times notes the recent 20th anniversary of the launch of NSFnet, a precursor to the Internet. Originally constructed to tie together the nation’s five supercomputer centers, by the time the academic network was shut down in 1996, it connected 6.6 million host computers and extended to 93 countries.

A critical decision was to adopt the then as unproven TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP served as a vital lingua franca between previously incompatible computer networks.
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