networks reduced the 113-node ARPANET by 68 nodes. After MILNET was split away, the ARPANET would continue be used as an Internet backbone for researchers, but be slowly phased out. Decommissioning In 1985, the NSF funded the establishment of national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided network access and network interconnectivity with the NSFNET project in 1986. NSFNET became the Internet backbone for government agencies and universities. The ARPANET project was formally decommissioned in 1990. The original IMPs and TIPs were phased out as the ARPANET was shut down after the introduction of the NSFNet, but some IMPs remained in service as late as July 1990. In the wake of the decommissioning of the ARPANET on 28 February 1990, Vinton Cerf wrote the following lamentation, entitled "Requiem of the ARPANET": Legacy The ARPANET was related to many other research projects, which either influenced the ARPANET design, or which were ancillary projects or spun out of the ARPANET. Senator Al Gore authored the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill", after hearing the 1988 concept for a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by Leonard Kleinrock. The bill was passed on 9 December 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore called the information superhighway. Inter-networking protocols developed by ARPA and implemented on the ARPANET paved the way for future commercialization of a new world-wide network, known as the Internet. The ARPANET project was honored with two IEEE Milestones, both dedicated in 2009. Software and protocols IMP functionality Because it was never a goal for the ARPANET to support IMPs from vendors other than BBN, the IMP-to-IMP protocol and message format were not standardized. However, the IMPs did nonetheless communicate amongst themselves to perform link-state routing, to do reliable forwarding of messages, and to provide remote monitoring and management functions to ARPANET's Network Control Center. Initially, each IMP had a 6-bit identifier, and supported up to 4 hosts, which were identified with a 2-bit index. An ARPANET host address, therefore, consisted of both the port index on its IMP and the identifier of the IMP, which was written with either port/IMP notation or as a single byte; for example, the address of MIT-DMG (notable for hosting development of Zork) could be written as either 1/6 or 70. An upgrade in early 1976 extended the host