This image is a visualization study of inbound traffic measured in billions of bytes on the NSFNET T1 backbone for the month of September 1991. The modern internet was born in 1987, when a NSF grant provided the funding for a consortium of IBM, MCI and a center at the University of Michigan called Merit to create a network of networks--or internet--capable of carrying data at speeds up to 56 kilobits a second.
Credit: Donna Cox and Robert Patterson, courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois |