CSNET

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CSNET

CSNET (the "Computer Science Network") was funded by the U.S. 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....
in the early 1980s (the initial contract was for the three-year period 1981-1984) with leadership by Larry Landweber (University of Wisconsin), David J. Farber

David J. Farber

David J. 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 Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Heinz College, and Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carneg...
(University of Delaware), Peter Denning (Purdue University), and Douglas Comer (Purdue University). Rand Corporation was the fourth institution involved in the project. CSNET was a computer network linking academic Computer Science departments nationwide.

The CSNET project had three primary components: the Phonenet mail system (Delaware), a name server (Wisconsin), and a TCP/IP-over-X.25 tunnel (Purdue).

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Encyclopedia

CSNET (the "Computer Science Network") was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

David J. Farber

ARPANET

The ARPANET developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War, was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet....
, to which many Computer Science departments didn't have the privilege of access. CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25

X.25

X.25 is an ITU-T standard network layer protocol for Packet switched network wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of Packet switching nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links....
, but it also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. Phonenet allowed an institution to have Unix mail services with the underlying transport mechanism being a loosely-connected phone relay network. The name server allowed manual and automated email address lookup based on a variety of attributes of a user (e.g., name, title, institution, etc.). The X.25 tunneling allowed an institution to connect directly to the ARPANET via a commercial X.25 service (e.g., Telenet), where the institution's TCP/IP traffic would be tunneled through to a CSNET machine that would act as a relay between the ARPANET and the commercial X.25 networks. CSNET was developed on DEC VAX 11/750 and 11/780 systems using BSD Unix, but it grew to support a variety of hardware and OS platforms.

CSNET was a forerunner to NSFNet

NSFNet

The National Science Foundation Network was a major part of early 1990s Internet backbone....
. It operated autonomously until 1989, when it merged with Bitnet

BITNET

BITNET was a cooperative U.S. university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University....
to form CREN

Corporation for Research and Educational Networking

The Corporation for Research and Educational Networking better known as CREN was a not-for-profit corporation originally comprised of the higher education and research organizations participating in BITNET and CSNET....
. By 1991 the growth of the Internet had made the CSNET services redundant, and CREN discontinued them.

External links

, Larry Landweber, ACM SIGCOMM, 1983