The Los Nettos Consortium was created in 1988 by group of Southern California researchers to provide cost-effective connections to the national NSFNET backbone for local campuses and research institutes. Led by Danny Cohen and Jon Postel of USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the group included Charles Seitz of Caltech, Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA, and Richard Kaplan of USC. The group had the benefit of support from Mark Pullen of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Science and Technology Office (DARPA/ISTO).
The founding members of Los Nettos made commitments to create the regional network in June 1988. The necessary hardware began to arrive in October 1988; testing started in November, and the first four nodes of the network (ISI, UCLA, USC, Caltech) were up by December 1988. After CERFNet was built in the San Diego area in 1989, Los Nettos and CERFNet provided backup links to the NSFNET backbone for each other.
Today, Los Nettos continues to provide connectivity to Los Angeles area educational and research organizations. It is administered and operated by the Information Technology Services (ITS) division of the University of Southern California on behalf of the Los Nettos Consortium.
Timeline
See the 1988 entry in the Hobbes Internet Timeline for a more general timeline.