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

NSF in American Sign Language. With NSF support, William Stokoe and other linguists and psycholinguists demonstrated that ASL is a full-blown language, with all of the fundamental formal properties of a spoken language. This finding revolutionized deaf education in the U.S.A.

Credit: Photodisc

The Very Large Array (VLA), one of the components of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, is a collection of 27 radio antennas located in Socorro, New Mexico. Dedicated in 1980, the VLA is used by astronomers from around the world to study everything from black holes to planetary nebulae. The NSF has funded the NRAO since its founding in 1956.

Credit: NRAO/AUI