Computing, IT & AI

ERNET, India's first internet network

1986-1995 CEDepartment of Electronics, IITs, IISc and NCSTERNET project (1986), funded by the Government of India and UNDPPan-Indian / unspecified

1986

The Education and Research Network, which first connected Indian institutions to the internet.

Dated: 1986–1995
As scholars put it: 1986-1995 CE
Originator: Department of Electronics, IITs, IISc and NCST
Source text: ERNET project (1986), funded by the Government of India and UNDP
Region: Pan-Indian / unspecified
Discipline: Computing, IT & AI
Evidence: Documented
Confidence: High
Verification: Verified-web

A proposal for an academic network

In 1983 Srinivasan Ramani, a computer scientist at the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) in Bombay, proposed an Indian academic network that would link the country's universities and laboratories by computer ⁴. Three years later the Department of Electronics turned the idea into a project. ERNET, the Education and Research Network, began in 1986 with money from the Government of India and the United Nations Development Programme ¹³.

The first phase joined eight institutions: NCST, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, five IITs and the Department of Electronics itself ³. Ramani coordinated the NCST team, which built the network's central mail switch and its international gateway ⁴. At IISc, the group that included Anurag Kumar, who joined as project coordinator in 1988 after networking work at Bell Labs, laid more than a kilometre of Ethernet cable, some of it underground, to wire up the campus ³.

Email before the internet

ERNET's first service was not the web but email, carried by UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy), a store-and-forward system in which computers dialled each other and swapped queued messages ¹³. Dial-up UUCP links ran between NCST and IIT Bombay in 1986 and 1987, and a machine could dial UUNET in the United States to exchange mail with American universities ¹³.

In 1987 Ramani's team opened a link to Amsterdam using TCP over the X.25 packet network, which the Internet Hall of Fame describes as India's first international computer connection of its kind, and in 1988 they connected to UUNET in Falls Church, Virginia ⁴. By February 1992 Ramani was posting instructions to a mailing list of Indologists abroad on how to write to scholars in India: addresses of the form name@node.ernet.in reached about forty institutions, from research laboratories to universities ⁵.

From leased lines to a real gateway

The network grew one slow link at a time. In 1990 the InterNIC allotted ERNET the Class B address block 144.16.0.0, and in January 1991 the first leased line, at 9.6 kbit/s, joined Delhi and Mumbai ¹. By 1992 every IIT, IISc, NCST and the Department of Electronics were connected at that speed, and a 64 kbit/s internet gateway from NCST to UUNET in Virginia was commissioned ¹.

ERNET ran two protocol families side by side, the internet's TCP/IP and the internationally standardised OSI stack, until almost all traffic moved to TCP/IP in 1995 ¹. A satellite network of VSAT terminals, added in 1993, reached campuses that had no good terrestrial line ¹. In 1992, with several Bangalore universities dialling in, ERNET was in effect the country's first internet service provider, three years before the public could buy access from VSNL ³.

What it left behind

When UNDP reviewed the project in 1997 it judged it a success, and in 1998 the network was spun off as ERNET India, an autonomous society under the Department of Electronics ¹³. It still connects universities and research institutes, more than 1,300 of them by one account ³.

Its larger legacy is people. The engineers who wrote protocol software and ran mail switches for ERNET in the late 1980s were among the first in India to understand the internet from the inside, and several, like Chandrika Shridhar and Gopi Garge, stayed with the network for three decades ³. Ramani was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014 for this work ⁴.

Background

ERNET began in 1986, connecting NCST Bombay, IISc, five IITs and the Department of Electronics. It ran both TCP/IP and OSI protocols, received the Class B address block 144.16.0.0 in 1990, and in 1992 opened a 64 kbit/s gateway from NCST Bombay to UUNET in the United States.

Significance

Brought the internet to India and built national skills in network protocol software, nearly a decade before public access.

Path to modern innovation

Still serves education and research institutions.

Global impact

Gave Indian universities email and internet access from the late 1980s.