Fuzzball routers were the first modern routers on the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

. They were DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 LSI-11 computers loaded with the Fuzzball software written by David L. Mills

David L. Mills

David L. Mills is an American computer engineer and Internet pioneer. Mills earned his PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971...

 (of the University of Delaware

University of Delaware

The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...

). The name "Fuzzball" was the colloquialism

Colloquialism

A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...

 for Mills' routing software. Six provided the routing backbone of the first 56 kbit/s NSFnet

NSFNet

The National Science Foundation Network was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation beginning in 1985 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States...

, allowing the testing of many of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

's first protocols. It allowed the development of the first TCP/IP routing protocols, and the Network Time Protocol

Network Time Protocol

The Network Time Protocol is a protocol and software implementation for synchronizing the clocks of computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks. Originally designed by David L...

. They were the first routers to implement key refinements to TCP/IP like variable-length subnet masks.