Editing Fuzzball router (section)

{{Short description|First routers on the internet}}
'''Fuzzball routers''' were the first modern [[router (computing)|router]]s on the [[Internet]].<ref name=Malamud/> They were [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] [[PDP-11]] computers (usually [[LSI-11]] personal workstations) loaded with the Fuzzball software written by [[David L. Mills]] (of the [[University of Delaware]]).<ref name=NSF/><ref name="thefuzz"/> 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.<ref name=thefuzz/><ref name=DCN/> It acquired the nickname sometime after it was rewritten in 1977.<ref name=thefuzz/>

Six Fuzzball routers provided the routing backbone of the first 56&nbsp;kbit/s [[NSFNET]],<ref name=nsfnet/><ref name=legacy/> allowing the testing of many of the [[Internet]]'s first protocols.<ref name=RFC819/> It allowed the development of the first TCP/IP routing protocols,<ref name=tcpip/> and the [[Network Time Protocol]].<ref name=NTP/> They were the first routers to implement key refinements to TCP/IP such as variable-length [[subnet mask]]s.<ref name=ospf/>