Internet History Webinar - Taming Tigers: Finding Routers for NSFNET - 1985-1994

The fourth in the series of Internet2 History events, this webinar was hosted by Dennis Jennings on May 23, 2023.

These were the presentations from the event:
“The Early Routers and Interoperability” — Scott Bradner: The concept of deploying small special purpose computers (i.e. “routers”) to manage traffic in data networks had been around for decades, yet when it came time for the NSFNET interim backbone to be deployed in the mid 1980s commercially available devices were few. And, there were not many options when the NSFNET speed was to be increased to T3 (45Mbps) in the early 1990s. This talk will explore the development of routers from the early 1960s to the devices used in the T3 NSFNET.

“Routing Software” – Susan Hares: The explosive growth in the number of NSFNET networks, and the complexity of the interconnections between them and to other national and international IP networks, challenged the internet community to develop appropriate routing algorithms and standards. This talk will chart the development of IP routing software over that tumultuous decade from 1985 to 1994.

“Gigabit Routers” – Craig Partridge: As the growth of the NSFNET / Internet exploded at the end of the 1980s, the Internet community realized that one of its many immediate challenges was router performance. At the time, routers were designed around a single processor and a single high-speed bus. The community realized this architecture would fail at data rates much over 2 Gbps, far below anticipated backbone router data rates in the near future. It was clear to almost everyone that future routers had to be built around a switched backplane, but it was not at all clear how to adapt IP routers to work on switched backplanes. Craig will talk about the router industry’s attempts to solve this problem and, after several mis-steps, the creation of the modern backbone router architecture.