Internet

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On April 30, 1995, the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET backbone, which removed the last restrictions on carrying commercial traffic. The backbone was handed off to commercial providers, including MCI, PSINet and Sprint, and by 1996 Sprint was the world’s largest carrier of Internet traffic. Capacity was a problem, though, and laying new fiber was slow and expensive. In June 1996, Ciena put the first dense wavelength division multiplexing system on Sprint’s network, which let existing fiber carry far more data.

The World Wide Web had opened to the public in 1991, but it was in the late 1990s that it became something ordinary people used. Email, mailing lists, maps (e.g., MapQuest), forums and personal websites were all common, and online shopping took off with Amazon and eBay. By today’s standards the sites were plain – static pages, frames and tables for layout, guestbooks, lots of little GIF buttons, and feedback sent by email. From 1997 to 2001 the first dot-com bubble drove the value of Internet companies to exceedingly high levels, and then the market crashed. However, it only slowed things down for a short time.

The way the Internet was run changed as well. In 1998, the technical coordination of domain names and IP addresses was reorganized under ICANN, a California non-profit contracted by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Jon Postel, who had managed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and served as RFC Editor for years, died that same year. As you can see, the speed of the change was remarkable. The Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in 1993, and by 2000 that had grown to 51%.

Note

There are stamps commemorating the internet and computers, but not from this period or ones that look very good. This stamp commemorating Fullbright Scholarships (see Fulbright) seems fitting to me, the look of it. It’s an image of a person with an eye to high tech.

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Smithsonian (Internet)

2

Fulbright (Internet)

Atlanta Games (Internet)

Georgia O’Keeffe (Internet)

Hoagy Carmichael (Internet)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Internet)

1

Piping Plover (Internet)

Bogart & Wilder (Internet)

3

Pacific 97 (Internet)

Pacific 97 (Internet)

Dinosaurs (Internet)

Arthur Fiedler (Internet)

1

Dolls (Internet)

Aircraft (Internet)

Chaney (Internet)

Mars (Internet)

Benet (Internet)

2

Remember Maine (Internet)

Trans-Mississippi (Internet)

8

Alexander Calder (Internet)

Honey Birds (Internet)

American Art (Internet)

First Decade (Internet)

15

The Teens (Internet)

15

The Twenties (Internet)

15

The Thirties (Internet)

15

Ayn Rand (Internet)

4

Bartram (Internet)

1

Olmsted (Internet)

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Glass (Internet)

Lorenz Hart (Internet)

Sonoran Desert (Internet)

Insects & Spiders (Internet)

The Forties (Internet)

15

The Fifties (Internet)

15

The Sixties (Internet)

15

The Seventies (Internet)

15

Main Page (Definitives)

9

Blue Jay (Definitives)

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Citron & Pineapple (Definitives)

7

Non-Profit (Definitives)

9

Space Shuttle (Definitives)

5

Breckenridge (Definitives)

14

Uncle Sam (Definitives)

10

Billy Mitchell (Definitives)

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Justin Morrill (Definitives)

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Berries (Definitives)

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