Fuzzball router

Template:Short description Fuzzball routers were the first modern routers on the Internet.<ref name=Malamud/> They were 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 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 masks.<ref name=ospf/>

See also

• Interface Message Processor

External links

• The Fuzzball, with photographs
• Fuzzball source code, last update in 1992, 16 megabytes