Merit Network, Inc.

Merit (once an acronym for Michigan Educational Research Information Triad) was an organization developed to research the effects of connecting large research universities together by means of a computer network. Officially established in 1966 and still operating today, "Merit is among the Internet pioneers and the oldest organization continuously providing data networking services" (Eric Aupperle, Merit--who, what, and why , p.3).

In 1964, Stanford Ericksen, Director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan, was tasked with writing a proposal for a "state-wide learning center" (Aupperle, p.1) for the Michigan state legislature and asked colleague Karl Zinn to contribute a portion of the proposal to the role of computers in education. Zinn wrote that "significant benefits might be gained from sharing computing resources via an electronic linkage between large, timesharing computers" (Aupperle, p.1). Zinn's small contribution had large implications. As a result, the legislature asked Ericksen and Zinn to study the idea of networking large universities. Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan formed MICIS, or the Michigan Inter-university Committee on Information Systems, eventually establishing itself as MERIT in 1966.

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