Stephen Wolff
lorenetworking
The programme director who built the American research backbone and, from the start, planned for it to stop needing him.
Taking over NSFNET in 1986, he identified two needs at once: infrastructure for the academic community, and a strategy to put that infrastructure on a footing ultimately independent of federal funding. The mechanism was to push the regional networks toward commercial customers so that scale would lower everyone's costs. Federal support for the backbone ended in April 1995, on purpose. A public official whose stated objective was to make his own programme unnecessary is rare enough in any field to be worth recording, and the commercial internet is what that decision produced.
Also known as: steve wolff, nsfnet
Sources
- Internet Society: when Steve Wolff took over the NSFNET program in 1986 he recognised the need for wide area networking infrastructure for the general academic and research community, along with the need to develop a strategy for establishing it on a basis ultimately independent of direct federal funding; NSF encouraged its regional networks to seek commercial, non-academic customers and exploit the resulting economies of scale to lower subscription costs for all
- Internet Hall of Fame 2013: Wolff developed NSFNET, the first open computer network in the United States for the support of research and higher education