當時的傳輸速度是 50kbps (kilobits per second)，亦即每秒 51200 嗶。 而柏克萊版本的 UNIX 作業系統 (4.2BSD) 內附了 TCP/IP 和網路應用軟體。 這些發展使得 TCP/IP 成為實際上最主要的通訊協定，因此它就逐漸成了標準。 在主機與網路之間，安裝了一種稱為 IMP (Interface Message Processors) 的介面裝置，後來演化成\em{路由器} (router)。
1988, The upgrade of the NSFNET backbone to T1 completes and the Internet starts to become more international with the connection of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. 1989, Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom join the Internet. 1989, Networks speed up. NSFNET T3 (45Mbps) nodes operate. At Interop 100Mbps LAN technology, known as FDDI, interoperates among several vendor
Most important for the Internet, NSF issues a request for proposals to establish supercomputer centers that will provide access to the entire U.S. research community, regardless of discipline and location. A new division of Advanced Scientific Computing is created with a budget of $200 million over five years.
1990 ARPANET formally shuts down. In twenty years, `the net' has grown from 4 to over 300,000 hosts. Countries connecting in 1990 include Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland. 1991 The net's dramatic growth continues with NSF lifting any restrictions on commercial use. The NSFNET backbone upgrades to T3, or 44 Mbps. Total traffic exceeds 1 trillion bytes, or 10 billion packets per month! Over 100 countries are now connected with over 600,000 hosts and nearly 5,000 separate networks. 1992 During the summer, students at NCSA in Champagne-Urbana modify Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext proposal. In a few weeks MOSAIC is born within the campus. Larry Smarr shows it to Jim Clark, who founds Netscape as a result.