Good Morning!

Good Morning! May I have your attention!

Good Morning!!!

I'm Eric Aupperle, Merit's past president. I'm honored and delighted to have this opportunity to welcome you to NANOG's tenth anniversary meeting.

As many of you know, NANOG traces it's beginning to the 1994 end of the NSFNET era.

One of Merit's responsibilities while we managed NSFNET was to provide a venue for information exchange among and with the technical leadership of the Regional Networks. These were known as the Regional Tech's meetings. They proved valuable for sharing information about the status of the NSFNET backbone and the regional networks. NANOG is the follow-on to these Regional Tech meetings.

The NSFNET era dates to the mid 1980s when the first NSFNET backbone linked the newly formed supercomputer centers with a 56 kbps network. While Merit had a hand it that network too, it was soon replaced with the T-1 network provided by the Merit, IBM and MCI partnership in July 1988. The Regional Tech's meetings date to 1988 as well. So a case can be made for NANOG having a history of sixteen years. Still that's less than the Mac's twenty-year history!

It was in the fall of 1969 that ARPANET began to come on-line, the beginning of what has evolved into today's Internet. That same fall Merit began planning its network to interconnect our founding Members, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University. Our network's first successful connection occurred in December 1971. That marked the beginning of today's extensive, state-of-Michigan-wide, MichNet.

I mention these events and dates for us to visualize the thirty-five year Internet timeline. While ARPANET was a success and provided the foundations for the Internet, the Internet's dramatic expansion waited for the NSFNET era, nearly twenty years later. As Susan Harris and others will recall for you subsequently.

Regardless of how we contemplate this timeline, i.e., whether it's the thirty-five years from the start of the ARPNET, the sixteen years from the beginning of the NSFNET, or NANOG's ten years, these are all historically short timeframes during which so much has changed. You've all been part of this transformation and have much to be proud of.

Thank you and now I'll turn the meeting over to Susan, Merit's NANOG coordinator.