
62 Networking Explained, Second Edition
10. What happened to ARPANET and NSFNET?
In 1990, ARPANET was decommissioned, and the level of commercialization of the
Internet led the National Science Foundation to remove the NSFNET backbone from
active service on April 30, 1995. This latter action, however, did not occur without consid-
erable forethought. For example, in May 1993, two years prior to NSFNET’s retirement,
NSF solicited proposals to design a new infrastructure capable of serving the needs of not
only government, research, and educational organizations, but also those of the commer-
cial user and general public. Furthermore, NSF maintained ...