Larry Smarr, Internet’s grandfather, looking for an encore
November 19, 2003
In 1985, Larry Smarr started championing the construction of the first National Science Foundation (NSF) backbone, which connected the five NSF supercomputer centers in 1986. The project that involved the likes of Milo Medin (of @Home) rapidly evolved first into the NSFnet, and then into todayÌs commercial Internet. At the time he was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). On his watch a geeky college student Marc Andreessen and his colleagues developed the first web-browser, Mosaic and unleashed the Internet revolution.