Fuzzball routers were the first modern routers on the Internet.[1] They were DEC PDP-11 computers (usually LSI-11 personal workstations) loaded with the Fuzzball software written by David L. Mills (of the University of Delaware).[2][3] The name "Fuzzball" was the colloquialism for Mills's routing software. The software evolved from the Distributed Computer Network (DCN) that started at the University of Maryland in 1973.[3][4] It acquired the nickname sometime after it was rewritten in 1977.[3]

Six Fuzzball routers provided the routing backbone of the first 56 kbit/s NSFNET,[5][6] allowing the testing of many of the Internet's first protocols.[7] It allowed the development of the first TCP/IP routing protocols,[8] and the Network Time Protocol.[9] They were the first routers to implement key refinements to TCP/IP such as variable-length subnet masks.[10]

See also

References

  1. ^ Malamud, Carl (1992). "Round 1: from INTEROP to IETF". Exploring the Internet: a technical travelogue. Prentice Hall. p. 88. ISBN 0-13-296898-3.
  2. ^ "Fuzzball: The Innovative Router". The Internet: Changing the Way We Communicate. NSF. Archived from the original on 2 February 2017.
  3. ^ a b c Mills, D.L. (August 1988). The Fuzzball (PDF). ACM SIGCOMM 88 Symposium. Palo Alto, CA. pp. 115–122.
  4. ^ Mills, David L. (1976). "An overview of the distributed computer network". Proceedings of the June 7-10, 1976, national computer conference and exposition on - AFIPS '76. pp. 523–531. doi:10.1145/1499799.1499874. S2CID 13375745.
  5. ^ Mills, D.L.; Braun, H.-W. (August 1987). The NSFNET Backbone Network (PDF). ACM SIGCOMM 87 Symposium. Stoweflake, VT. pp. 191–196.
  6. ^ David L. Mills (29 November 2007). "The NSFnet Phase-I Backbone and The Fuzzball Router" (PDF). Presentation at the NSFNET Legacy event, 2007. pp. 38–48.
  7. ^ Mills, D.L. (December 1983). DCN Local-Network Protocols. IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0891. RFC 891. Retrieved 7 December 2022.
  8. ^ Kozierok, Charles M. (2005). The TCP/IP guide: a comprehensive, illustrated Internet protocols reference. No Starch Press. pp. 679–681. ISBN 1-59327-047-X.
  9. ^ Mills, David L. (2010). "Technical History of NTP". Computer Network Time Synchronization: the Network Time Protocol on Earth and in Space (2nd ed.). CRC Press. pp. 377–396. doi:10.1201/b10282-20. ISBN 978-1-4398-1463-5.
  10. ^ Moy, John T. (1998). OSPF: anatomy of an Internet routing protocol. Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-201-63472-3.

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