Internet: Backbone

The first Internet backbone was invented to assist in the attempt to share supercomputers. The U.S. government realized that supercomputing was crucial to advances in science, defense, and economic competitiveness but the budget for research was insufficient to provide supercomputers for all scientists who needed them. Thus, the first Internet backbone, called the NSFNET because it was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), linked six supercomputing centers (University of California-San Diego, National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Cornell University, and the John von Neumann Supercomputing Center/Princeton) and their associated regional networks in the United States in order to provide supercomputer access to scientists. Today, a single government-managed Internet backbone has been transformed into a multitude of different backbones, most of which are private commercial enterprises...