Editing National Science Foundation (section)

====1990–99====
In 1990 the NSF's appropriation passed $2&nbsp;billion for the first time. NSF funded the development of several curricula based on the [[NCTM standards]], devised by the [[National Council of Teachers of Mathematics]]. These standards were widely adopted by school districts during the subsequent decade. However, in what newspapers such as the ''[[Wall Street Journal]]'' called the "math wars", organizations such as [[Mathematically Correct]] complained that some elementary texts based on the standards, including [[Mathland]], had almost entirely abandoned any instruction of traditional arithmetic in favor of cutting, coloring, pasting, and writing. During that debate, NSF was both lauded and criticized for favoring the standards.{{cn|date=March 2025}}

In 1991 the NSFNET [[acceptable use policy]] was altered to allow commercial traffic. By 1995, with private, commercial market thriving, NSF decommissioned the NSFNET, allowing for public use of the Internet. In 1993 students and staff at the NSF-supported [[National Center for Supercomputing Applications]] (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, developed [[Mosaic (web browser)|Mosaic]], the first freely available browser to allow [[World Wide Web]] pages that include both graphics and text. Within 18 months, NCSA Mosaic becomes the Web browser of choice for more than a million users, and sets off an exponential growth in the number of Web users. In 1994 NSF, together with [[DARPA]] and [[NASA]], launched the Digital Library Initiative.<ref>[https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/cyber/digitallibraries.jsp Digital Libraries] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190207233414/https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/cyber/digitallibraries.jsp |date=February 7, 2019 }} at nsf.gov</ref> One of the first six grants went to [[Stanford University]], where two graduate students, [[Larry Page]] and [[Sergey Brin]], began to develop a search engine that used the links between Web pages as a ranking method, which they later commercialized under the name [[Google]].{{cn|date=March 2025}}

In 1996 NSF-funded research established beyond doubt that the chemistry of the atmosphere above Antarctica was grossly abnormal and that levels of key chlorine compounds are greatly elevated. During two months of intense work, NSF researchers learned most of what is known about the [[ozone hole]].{{cn|date=March 2025}}

In 1998 two independent teams of NSF-supported astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up, as if some previously unknown force, now known as [[dark energy]], is driving the galaxies apart at an ever-increasing rate.{{cn|date=March 2025}}

Since passage of the Small Business Technology Transfer Act of 1992 (Public Law 102–564, Title II), NSF has been required to reserve 0.3% of its extramural research budget for Small Business Technology Transfer awards, and 2.8% of its R&D budget for small business innovation research.{{cn|date=March 2025}}