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Just as a side note: the Internet was not actually created to organize US troops in the event of a nuclear strike. The Internet, the one initially birthed by AR
by pavpanchekha 7y ago
Just as a side note: the Internet was not actually created to organize US troops in the event of a nuclear strike. The Internet, the one initially birthed by ARPA, initially had academic and civilian aims. That said, some of the early research on networking was developed to aid the military in case of nuclear war. In particular, Paul Baran invented package switching explicitly to help the US air force maintain its defense radar network in case of war.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThat was in fact the impetus: While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Paul Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet's underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964. https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html Baran's original packet (block) switched networks development papers, and in fact his entire catalogue, are available at RAND: "On Distributed Communications I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks" https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html (This and the others are listed at the first link.)