Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/inet/isoc/announcement

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ISOC-ANNOUNCEMENT                                               1/27/92

                       The Internet Society



                             Abstract

The purpose of this document is to provide a brief description of the Internet
Society and its goals and objectives. It will function as a professional
society to facilitate, support and promote the evolution and growth of the
Internet as a global research communications infrastructure. The suggestions
and recommendations of all parties interested in the Internet are solicited to
assist in making the Internet Society robust, productive and structured to meet
the needs of its members.


The Internet Society

The Internet, is a collection of cooperating, interconnected, multiprotocol
networks which supports international collaboration among thousands of
organizations. Because of its current scope and rapid rate of growth, the
Internet will benefit from a more organized framework to support its
objectives. To this end, an Internet Society is being formed to foster the
voluntary interconnection of computer networks into a global research and
development communications and information infrastructure. The Internet Society
will not operate the Internet. Internet operation will continue to be a
collaborative activity which the Society will seek to facilitate. The Society
will provide assistance and support to groups and organizations involved in the
use, operation and evolution of the Internet.  It will provide support for
forums in which technical and operational questions can be discussed and
provide mechanisms through which interested parties can be informed and
educated about the Internet, its function, use, operation and the interests of
its constituents.


Membership

The Internet Society will be a membership organization with voting individual
members and non-voting institutional members. There will be several classes of
institutional members. The society will produce a newsletter on a regular basis
and hold an annual meeting to which all members and other interested parties
will be invited. The topics of the annual meeting will vary, but are expected
to focus on current research in networking, Internet functionality and growth,
and other interests of the Society constituency. All members will receive the
newsletter and an invitation to attend the annual meeting of the Internet
Society.

Membership dues will vary according to class of membership. The amounts of
these dues and the basis on which they are set will be determined by the Board
of Trustees of the Society and may be revised from time to time as set forth in
the By-Laws.

Charter

The Society will be a non-profit organization and will be operated for
academic, educational, charitable and scientific purposes among which are:

     A.   To facilitate and support the technical
          evolution of the Internet as a research and
          education infrastructure and to stimulate
          involvement of the academic, scientific and
          engineering communities, among others in the
          evolution of the Internet.

     B.   To educate the academic and scientific
          communities and the public concerning the
          technology, use and application of the
          Internet.

     C.   To promote scientific and educational
          applications of Internet technology for the
          benefit of educational institutions at all grade
          levels, industry and the public at large.

     D.   To provide a forum for exploration of new
          Internet applications and to foster
          collaboration among organizations in their
          operation and use of the Internet.


Activities of the Society

a. Support for Internet Technical Evolution

The Internet Activities Board (IAB) has been concerned with the development and
evolution of architectures supporting the use of multiple protocols in a
networked environment. The Internet Society will incorporate the IAB and its
functions into the operation of the Internet Society.  The Internet Society
will work with other interested organizations to support and assist efforts to
evolve the multiprotocol Internet. The Internet Society will use the Internet
Engineering and Research Task Forces to stimulate networking research and
facilitate the evolution of the TCP/IP protocol suite and the integration of
new protocol suites (e.g. OSI) into the Internet architecture.  The Internet
Society will work actively with parties and organizations interested in
fostering improvement in the utility of the Internet for its constituent users.

b. Meetings and Conferences

Internet Society will convene an annual meeting and will organize and
facilitate workshops and symposia, jointly with other organizations where
appropriate, on specific topics of interest to the Society membership. The
annual meeting will address issues of global and regional importance to the
evolution and growth of the Internet. In particular, future INET conferences
will be incorporated into the Society's annual meetings.

c. Information and Infrastructure Services

The Internet Society will publish an Internet Newsletter providing members with
information about the international activities of Internet constituents. In
addition, the Society will also provide assistance to and support for
organizations responsible for maintaining the databases crucial to Internet
function (e.g. the Domain Name System, X.500 Directory Services, etc.) and
organizations concerned with the security of the Internet (e.g. the Software
Engineering Institute Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and its
CERT-System).  The Society will assist in the development of educational,
advisory and informative materials of use to Society members. Where
appropriate, the Society will organize or support activities which aid in the
coordination among the organizations operating components of the Internet.

The Society will refer members to appropriate parties involved in operating the
various parts of the Internet where they may be helpful with specific
questions. Where possible, the Society would seek to provide access to its
information on-line, but would also offer hard copy and, perhaps eventually,
CD-ROM-based information resources.

Plans

The initial organizers of the Internet Society include the Corporation for
National Research Initiatives (CNRI), EDUCOM and the Internet Activities Board.
During the six month period from June - December 1991, the organizers will work
with interested parties to prepare for beginning operation of the Society by
the end of 1991.  Computer networking has become a critical infrastructure for
the research and development community and has the potential to become the
basis for world-wide collaboration and cooperation in every field of human
endeavor. The Internet Society will seek to solidify, enhance and encourage
further international collaborative networking.  Individuals joining the
Society during its formation will receive special recognition as Society
pioneers and will have the opportunity to shape the early agenda of Society
activities. Opportunities for organizational and institutional participation
are also available.

It is time. The technology is available. A global renaissance of scientific and
technical cooperation is at hand. You are cordially invited to take part in an
enterprise without precedent and an adventure without boundary. The Internet
Society sets sail in January of 1992 on a voyage of internetwork discovery.
Will you be aboard?


                  APPENDIX

A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks


Introduction

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a
research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking
packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication
protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently
across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting
project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as
the "Internet".  The system of protocols which was developed over the course of
this research effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two
initial protocols developed:  Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet
Protocol (IP).

In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development
of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for
the Internet. With its 45 megabit per second facilities, the NSFNET carries on
the order of 7 billion packets per month between the networks it links. The
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of
Energy contributed additional backbone facilities in the form of the NSINET and
ESNET respectively. In Europe, major international backbones such as NORDUNET
and others provide connectivity to tens of thousands of computers on a large
number of networks. Commercial network providers in the U.S. and Europe are
beginning to offer Internet backbone and access support on a competitive basis
to any interested parties.

"Regional" support for the Internet is provided by various consortium networks
and "local" support is provided through each of the research and educational
institutions.  Within the United States, much of this support has come from the
federal and state governments, but a considerable contribution has been made by
industry. In Europe and elsewhere, support arises from cooperative
international efforts and through national research organizations.  During the
course of its evolution, particularly after 1989, the Internet system began to
integrate support for other protocol suites into its basic networking fabric.
The present emphasis in the system is on multiprotocol interworking, and in
particular, with the integration of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI)
protocols into the architecture.

Both public domain and commercial implementations of the roughly 100 protocols
of TCP/IP protocol suite became available in the 1980's. During the early
1990's, OSI protocol implementations also became available and, by the end of
1991, the Internet has grown to include some 5,000 networks in over three dozen
countries, serving over 600,000 host computers used by as many as 4,000,000
people.

Much of the support for the Internet community has come from the U.S. Federal
Government, since the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded
research program and, subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S.
research infrastructure. During the late 1980s, however, the population of
Internet users and network constituents expanded internationally and began to
include commercial facilities. Indeed, the bulk of the system today is made up
of private networking facilities in educational and research institutions,
businesses and in government organizations across the globe.

The Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Networks (CCIRN), which was
organized by the U.S. Federal Networking Council (FNC) and the European Reseaux
Associees pour la Recherche Europeenne (RARE), plays an important role in the
coordination of plans for government- sponsored research networking. CCIRN
efforts have been a stimulus for the support of international cooperation in
the Internet environment.


Internet Technical Evolution

Over its fifteen year history, the Internet has functioned as a collaboration
among cooperating parties. Certain key functions have been critical for its
operation, not the least of which is the specification of the protocols by
which the components of the system operate. These were originally developed in
the DARPA research program mentioned above, but in the last five or six years,
this work has been undertaken on a wider basis with support from Government
agencies in many countries, industry and the academic community. The Internet
Activities Board (IAB) was created in 1983 to guide the evolution of the TCP/IP
Protocol Suite and to provide research advice to the Internet community.

During the course of its existence, the IAB has reorganized several times. It
now has two primary components: the Internet Engineering Task Force and the
Internet Research Task Force. The former has primary responsibility for further
evolution of the TCP/IP protocol suite, its standardization with the
concurrence of the IAB, and the integration of other protocols into Internet
operation (e.g. the Open Systems Interconnection protocols). The Internet
Research Task Force continues to organize and explore advanced concepts in
networking under the guidance of the Internet Activities Board and with support
from various government agencies.

A secretariat has been created to manage the day-to-day function of the
Internet Activities Board and Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF meets three
times a year in plenary and its approximately 50 working groups convene at
intermediate times by electronic mail, teleconferencing and at face-to-face
meetings. The IAB meets quarterly face- to-face or by videoconference and at
intervening times by telephone, electronic mail and computer-mediated
conferences.

Two other functions are critical to IAB operation:  publication of documents
describing the Internet and the assignment and recording of various identifiers
needed for protocol operation. Throughout the development of the Internet, its
protocols and other aspects of its operation have been documented first in a
series of documents called Internet Experiment Notes and, later, in a series of
documents called Requests for Comment (RFCs). The latter were used initially to
document the protocols of the first packet switching network developed by
DARPA, the ARPANET, beginning in 1969, and have become the principal archive of
information about the Internet. At present, the publication function is
provided by an RFC editor.

The recording of identifiers is provided by the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority (IANA) who has delegated one part of this responsibility to an
Internet Registry which acts as a central repository for Internet information
and which provides central allocation of network and autonomous system
identifiers, in some cases to subsidiary registries located in various
countries. The Internet Registry (IR) also provides central maintenance of the
Domain Name System (DNS) root database which points to subsidiary distributed
DNS servers replicated throughout the Internet. The DNS distributed database is
used, inter alia, to associate host and network names with their Internet
addresses and is critical to the operation of the higher level TCP/IP protocols
including electronic mail.

There are a number of Network Information Centers (NICs) located throughout the
Internet to serve its users with documentation, guidance, advice and
assistance. As the Internet continues to grow internationally, the need for
high quality NIC functions increases. Although the initial community of users
of the Internet were drawn from the ranks of computer science and engineering,
its users now comprise a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, arts,
letters, business, military and government administration.

Related Networks

In 1980-81, two other networking projects, BITNET and CSNET, were initiated.
BITNET adopted the IBM RSCS protocol suite and featured direct leased line
connections between participating sites. Most of the original BITNET
connections linked IBM mainframes in university data centers. This rapidly
changed as protocol implementations became available for other machines. From
the beginning, BITNET has been multi-disciplinary in nature with users in all
academic areas. It has also provided a number of unique services to its users
(e.g., LISTSERV). Today, BITNET and its parallel networks in other parts of the
world (e.g., EARN in Europe) have several thousand participating sites. In
recent years, BITNET has established a backbone which uses the TCP/IP protocols
with RSCS-based applications running above TCP.

CSNET was initially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide
networking for university, industry and government computer science research
groups. CSNET used the Phonenet MMDF protocol for telephone-based electronic
mail relaying and, in addition, pioneered the first use of TCP/IP over X.25
using commercial public data networks. The CSNET name server provided an early
example of a white pages directory service and is still in use at numerous
sites. At its peak, CSNET had approximately 200 participating sites and
international connections to approximately fifteen countries. Today, CSNET
still provides services to a number of industrial sites and small colleges.

In 1987, BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and
Educational Networking (CREN). A key feature of CREN and its predecessors is
that they were entirely dependent on voluntary user fees;  BITNET from the
beginning and CSNET after the expiration of its initial five year NSF grant.