CERFnet

» see cerf.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the year cerfnet stopped being its own name is the year i got online. 1998, dial-up at home in turkey, on a modem that spent the next few years climbing toward 56k. cerfnet was ten years old by then and disappearing into at&t, and it had already done the thing that made my modem worth owning.

it started as a proposal. susan estrada had put a 56 kbps wide-area network under the san diego supercomputer center in 1985 and 1986, then helped wire the nsf supercomputer centers together at t1 speed. in january 1988 she wrote up the idea of doing the same for california's universities, and in june the supercomputer center and general atomics sent it to the national science foundation. the nsf answered in march 1989 with 2.8 million dollars.

backbone nodes went up on four campuses between may and june 1989. by november the network was live across thirty eight california research centers, and the backbone had reached oakland. everything ran on cisco routers, enough of them that estrada later reckoned cerfnet accounted for roughly a tenth of cisco's gross revenue in 1988. one of the first commercial customers was a san diego startup nobody had heard of yet called qualcomm.

none of this was ever going to touch a house in ankara. cerfnet's people were california research institutions and the companies that grew up next to them, and its whole operating life ended before i had my first email address. what reached me was downstream: the rule it helped break in 1991 is the reason a home dial-up account in turkey could talk to anything worth talking to.

~ the record ~

~ the name ~

it was meant to be surfnet, which is what you call a network run out of san diego. the dutch had registered that already. the fallback was an acronym, california education and research federation, which spells cerf, which is also the surname of the man who co-wrote tcp/ip. estrada asked vint cerf whether he minded. he did not.

in july 1989 the two of them launched the network by smashing a bottle of glitter over a cisco router at the supercomputer center. that is a ship christening performed on a piece of rack equipment, and it is a fair summary of how seriously the people building this stuff took themselves at the time.

~ the cix ~

the nsfnet backbone came with an acceptable use policy that forbade commercial traffic. this was not a technical limit, it was a funding condition, and by 1990 it had become absurd: there were commercial providers with paying customers who could not legally route packets to each other across the only backbone that existed.

in march 1991 cerfnet sat down with psinet and with uunet, and the three of them founded the commercial internet exchange. the arrangement was that member networks would swap each other's traffic without settlement and without asking what the packets were for. it is a peering agreement, which sounds like paperwork, and it is the moment the internet stopped being a research instrument with a policy attached.

~ the outreach ~

cerfnet also did the missionary work. dial n' cerf, launched in the early nineties, was one of the first dial-up ip services, meaning you could reach the internet over a phone line instead of a leased circuit. adopt a school opened in september 1991 and let cerfnet customers put a local k-12 school on that dial-up.

in october 1991 it started publishing a comic book. the adventures of captain internet and cerf boy, with a female superhero on the cover, handed out to explain what an internet was to people who had no reason to know. a regional research network with a comic book about itself is not a thing that happens twice.

~ the actual end ~

in 1993 the nsf split the internic contract three ways and general atomics took the information services piece through cerfnet. it did not go well. a review in december 1994 found the work below the required standard and general atomics was removed from the contract, with at&t picking up what it had been doing.

after that the exit was ordinary. general atomics sold cerfnet to teleport communications group in february 1997 for 2.1 million shares of stock. at&t announced it was buying teleport in january 1998 for about 11.3 billion dollars, and cerfnet became at&t cerfnet, then just a line item. the network that argued the commercial internet into existence was bought by a phone company inside seven years of winning the argument.

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