NSF funds establishment of NSFNet to connect its supercomputing centers.

In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the establishment of NSFNET, a TCP/IP network that initially connected six NSF-funded national supercomputing centers at a data rate of 56 kilobits per second (kbps). NSF subsequently awarded a contract to a partnership of Merit (one of the existing research networks), IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan to upgrade NSFNET to T-1 speed (1.544 megabits per second (Mbps)), and to interconnect several additional research networks.