1969: imp, interface message processor, sort of early router. price per imp $150.000, designed by bolt beranek &newman, bbn. a company that is still around today. still contractor of darpa? i have no idea.

1984: new kind of router for the nsfnet was needed. nsfnet inhaled arpanet and got itself inhaled later on by aol. the only companie that accomplished the spec for the switching gateways, as it was called back then, was - again - bbn; but their price was high: $250.000 for one router; with a discount from darpa you could get it for $180.000 ..

fuzzball, programmed by dave mills, made the game. One programmer in charge for the whole new network of networks, as nsfnet gets described. in fact one guy in charge of the internet backbone. he didn't get a ot of sleep during those days, dennis jennings says, at that time head of nsf.

i didn't ask for the price of snowball, but it must have been less than $10.000, because that was the price jennings felt is all right for campuses and regional networks and the backbone of nsfnet.

2007 cost of a cisco router: between $1,123.00 and $264.00 (i guess one would take a better one for something like a backbone ...)

as ever with your knowledge and instincts, this is a very good and interesting story. it's well worth further elaboration. if you want to do it for radio once, get me on the racket, please.
inflation cleaning should be done. the story of the cisco founding should go in it. it should also say what the big ix ciscos today do and cost what the difference between an olden time interface processor and a router is.

AR: now you can buy a router for $50, that would be able to handle mid80ies traffic with a load of 0,066. btw, i think ORF was one of the first companies in A to bye ca. 12 of those grey cisco backbone pots. amazing machines. we had one that was configured at startup, rebooted twice and never again until its retirement in 1998.
AR: in terms of org nsfnet inhaled arpanet but in nearly all other aspects arpanet ate up nsfnet.
AR: BBN did imp not by designing but by pimping an Honeywell GP minicomputer. Computer pimping still meant soldering AND programming then.
AR: AFAIK Fuzzball never was a product. It was a tape and kind of tarball that people adapted to PDP11s and ICL minicomputers. I think it came for the price of the tape as many things then. Maybe there was a license. The hardware was either there (quite obsolete already) or had to be purchased at a price clearly higher than $10.000. Ethernet was standard on those boxes but the telephone interface was an addon, i think. satellite interface was a box of its own talking to the cpu by all kinds of different electric and logical interfaces. So, a fully equipped hw platform for fuzzball would cost quite a bit, but was already present and mostly underused in technical ac institutions in the mid80ies.

Early Cisco AS MPR at CERN in 87