“There are so many important areas where this country could lead,” Mr. Weis said. “If we learned one thing with the NSFnet experience, I think it was that the government has the ability to help advance science and technology in this country by holding out a carrot, and using the stick as a pointer.”

The lesson learned, he said, is that it is crucial for government and industry to share financial risks. That would make it possible to move forward in areas as diverse as materials technology, biology and energy efficiency.

The specific form would be to create new “grand challenges” in technology, Mr. Weis said.

Though it’s almost impossible now to imagine living in a world without the Web, the transition from the academic and scientific NSFnet to the commercial Internet did not come without conflict. There were bitter arguments among the participants over whether commercialization should take place at all.

And when the National Science Foundation contracted with a partnership of I.B.M., the MCI Corporation and the Merit Network  a group of Michigan universities and a state agency  to manage the network’s backbone, the resulting Non-Profit Advanced Network Services created bitter resentment among early commercial Internet service providers.

“The idea of network as a service was a new thing, and it was difficult to convince everybody a) that it was a good idea and b) that it was legal,” said Steve Wolff, director of network research at the National Science Foundation from 1986 to 1995. According to a wide range of conference participants, NSFnet ultimately succeeded because of both the hacker culture of engineers that built the system and the very nature of the network they were creating; it fostered intellectual collaboration in a way not previously possible.

“The model of a network where no one is in charge is a model that can scale,” said Douglas E. Van Houweling, the chairman of the Merit Network when the NSFnet backbone was constructed.

Giving the network time to develop was vital, he added, because the Internet “was an alien concept to the communication industry when it began growing.”