Fuzzball routers were the first modern routers on the Internet.[1] They were DEC PDP-11 computers (usually LSI-11 personal workstations) loaded with the Fuzzball software written by David L. Mills (of the University of Delaware).[2][3] The name "Fuzzball" was the colloquialism for Mills's routing software. The software evolved from the Distributed Computer Network (DCN) that started at the University of Maryland in 1973.[3][4] It acquired the nickname sometime after it was rewritten in 1977.[3]
Six Fuzzball routers provided the routing backbone of the first 56 kbit/s NSFNET,[5][6] allowing the testing of many of the Internet's first protocols.[7] It allowed the development of the first TCP/IP routing protocols,[8] and the Network Time Protocol.[9] They were the first routers to implement key refinements to TCP/IP such as variable-length subnet masks.[10]
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