By the late 1980s the Internet was no longer a star with the ARPANET its center; it was a mesh, much like the ARPANET itself. The NSFNET program had democratized networks as even CSNET hadn’t. Now anyone on a college campus with an Internet connection could become an Internet user. The NSFNET was fast becoming the Internet’s spine, running on lines that were more than twenty-five times faster than ARPANET lines. Users now had a choice between connecting to the ARPANET or to the NSFNET backbone. Many chose the latter, not only for its speed but because it was so much easier to connect to.
