Editing History of the Internet (section)

===Transition towards the Internet===
The term "internet" was reflected in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675:<ref>{{cite ietf|rfc=675 |title=RFC 675 – Specification of internet transmission control program |year=1974 |doi=10.17487/RFC0675 |access-date=May 28, 2009|last1=Cerf |first1=V. |last2=Dalal |first2=Y. |last3=Sunshine |first3=C. }}</ref> Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as a short form of ''internetworking'', when the two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an internet was a collection of networks linked by a common protocol. In the time period when the ARPANET was connected to the newly formed [[NSFNET]] project in the late 1980s, the term was used as the name of the network, Internet, being the large and global TCP/IP network.<ref>{{cite book |last=Tanenbaum |first=Andrew S. |author-link=Andrew S. Tanenbaum |title=Computer Networks |url=https://archive.org/details/computernetwork000tane |url-access=registration |year=1996 |publisher=Prentice Hall |isbn=978-0-13-394248-4 }}</ref>

Opening the Internet and the fiber optic backbone to corporate and consumers increased demand for network capacity. The expense and delay of laying new fiber led providers to test a fiber bandwidth expansion alternative that had been pioneered in the late 1970s by [[Optelecom]] using "interactions between light and matter, such as lasers and optical devices used for [[Optical amplifier|optical amplification]] and wave mixing".<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Saleh|first1=Bahaa EA|title=Fundamentals of Photonics|last2=Teich|first2=Malvin Carl|publisher=John Wiley and Son|year=2019|pages=Preface xxii}}</ref> This technology became known as [[Wavelength-division multiplexing|wave division multiplexing (WDM)]]. Bell Labs deployed a 4-channel WDM system in 1995.<ref name="Winzer Neilson Chraplyvy 2018 p. 24190">{{cite journal | last1=Winzer | first1=Peter J. | last2=Neilson | first2=David T. | last3=Chraplyvy | first3=Andrew R. | title=Fiber-optic transmission and networking: the previous 20 and the next 20 years | journal=Optics Express | publisher=The Optical Society | volume=26 | issue=18 | date=31 August 2018 | pages=24190–24239 | doi=10.1364/oe.26.024190 |pmid=30184909|s2cid=52168806|doi-access=free}}</ref> To develop a mass capacity (dense) WDM system, [[Optelecom]] and its former head of Light Systems Research, [[David R. Huber]] formed a new venture, [[Ciena Corp.]], that deployed the world's first dense WDM system on the Sprint fiber network in June 1996.<ref name="Winzer Neilson Chraplyvy 2018 p. 24190"/> This was referred to as the real start of optical networking.<ref>{{cite book | last1=Cvijetic | first1=M. | last2=Djordjevic | first2=I. | title=Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks | publisher=Artech House | series=Artech House applied photonics series | year=2013 | isbn=978-1-60807-555-3}}</ref>

As interest in networking grew by needs of collaboration, exchange of data, and access of remote computing resources, the Internet technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. The hardware-agnostic approach in TCP/IP supported the use of existing network infrastructure, such as the [[International Packet Switched Service]] (IPSS) X.25 network, to carry Internet traffic.

Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet created simple gateways for the transfer of electronic mail, the most important application of the time. Sites with only intermittent connections used [[UUCP]] or [[FidoNet]] and relied on the gateways between these networks and the Internet. Some gateway services went beyond simple mail peering, such as allowing access to [[File Transfer Protocol]] (FTP) sites via UUCP or mail.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://ftp.cac.psu.edu/pub/internexus/ACCESS.PROVIDRS|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020112024958/http://ftp.cac.psu.edu/pub/internexus/ACCESS.PROVIDRS|archive-date=January 12, 2002|title=Internet Access Provider Lists|access-date=May 10, 2012}}</ref>

Finally, routing technologies were developed for the Internet to remove the remaining centralized routing aspects. The [[Exterior Gateway Protocol]] (EGP) was replaced by a new protocol, the [[Border Gateway Protocol]] (BGP). This provided a meshed topology for the Internet and reduced the centric architecture which ARPANET had emphasized. In 1994, [[Classless Inter-Domain Routing]] (CIDR) was introduced to support better conservation of address space which allowed use of [[supernet|route aggregation]] to decrease the size of [[routing table]]s.<ref>{{cite ietf|rfc=1871 |title=RFC 1871 – CIDR and Classful Routing |date=November 1995 |access-date=May 28, 2009|last1=Postel |first1=Jon |doi=10.17487/RFC1871 }}</ref>