Fuzzball routers were the first modern routers on the Internet.[1] They were DECPDP-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]
^ abcMills, D.L. (August 1988). The Fuzzball(PDF). ACM SIGCOMM 88 Symposium. Palo Alto, CA. pp. 115–122.
^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. S2CID13375745.
^Mills, D.L.; Braun, H.-W. (August 1987). The NSFNET Backbone Network(PDF). ACM SIGCOMM 87 Symposium. Stoweflake, VT. pp. 191–196.
^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 (inactive 2024-11-11). ISBN978-1-4398-1463-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
