"We wanted a framework that could grow over time as people developed new applications," he said.

By 1972, the first e-mail program was invented by Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), which recently merged with GTE. Until two weeks ago, BBN was Harvard's Internet service provider. The University upgraded its link and switched providers to AT&T.

Ten years later, ARPA established the current language of the Internet, TCP/IP.

Separate from ARPANET, the National Science Foundation (NSF) built NSFNET in 1986, comprised of five supercomputers that served as the Internet's backbone until the Internet was privatized earlier this decade.

According to Crocker, "NSFNET was really just an extension of the ARPANET with a lot of other technology thrown in."

Making the Internet's early growth seem sluggish, NSFNET was capable of speeds known as T1--about 25 times those of the original three years later.

Within another three years, the backbone had a capacity dubbed T3--700 times faster than the original.

But it is, in part, the limits of this backbone that has prompted efforts to increase, yet again, the speed of the Internet.

Not the Only One

But Internet 2 is not the only attempt being made to speed up the Internet. It is being led primarily by universities, while the federal government has its own plan to upgrade the Internet, known as the "Next Generation Internet" (NGI).

Similar to the origins of ARPANET, the NGI will begin with a focus on research universities, national labs and military applications.

The same agencies that were involved in the conception and evolution of the original Internet, will be spearheading the NGI. These agencies include the NSF, the organization formerly known as ARPA, NASA and the Department of Education.

The initiative's three goals are to get research sites connected at speeds from 100 to 1000 times faster than at present, promote new network technology experimentation and enable development of software with direct national application, especially defense.

For example, the NGI will be able to transmit the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in under one second, and defense agencies will be able to coordinate data from multiple satellites in order to gain "information dominance."

"NGI has been heavily confused with the vBNS and Internet 2," Bradner said.