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The Internet is a collection of networks originally paid for by the U.S. Department of Defense. Its purpose was to provide a communications infrastructure more resilient to attack than the public communications channels in the event of war. When research became a priority in the 1960s and 1970s, money was given to the National Science Foundation, which became the de facto administrator of the network. The NSF ran the primary arteries of the Internet until the late 1980s. A substantial amount of funding was later added by the U.S. Congress when it decided to include the federal supercomputing facilities in the Internet. As universities tied into the network, they would pay to link a particular network, such as the Bitnet, with the Internet. [2]
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Guynes et al. (1997) studied this question.
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