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A: Washington, District of Columbia, United States

"Toward a National Research Telecommunications Network"

11/1987

In 1987 C. Gordon Bell, as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Computer Networking, Infrastructure and Digital Communications of the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering and Technology, published A Report to the Office of Technology Policy on Computer Networks to Support Research in the United States. A Study of Critical Problems and Future Options. The report states:

“Over the next 15 years, there will be a need for a 100,000 times increase in national network capacity to enable researchers to exploit computer capabilities for representing complex data in visual form, for manipulating and interacting with this complex data and for sharing large data bases with other researchers.”

“As the first step, the current Internet system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the networks supported by agencies for researchers should be interconnected. These facilities, if coordinated and centrally managed, have the capability to interconnect many computer networks into a single virtual computer network. As the second step, the existing computer networks that support research programs should be expanded and upgraded to serve 200-400 research institutions with 1.5 million bits per second capabilities.

“As the third step, network service should be provided to every research institution in the U.S., with transmission speeds of three billion bits per second.” (p. 3)

Bell summarized the report in an article called Toward A National Research Telecommunications Network.

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