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>It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was
by nix23 6y ago
>It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, but was an aspect of the earlier RAND study of secure communication. The later work on internetworking did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks
- dredmorbius 6y agoI was simply pointing to original source docs from one of the co-inventors of packet-based switching, on which the Internet is based. There's a larger series of Baran's works at RAND: https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html Nukes were definitely part of the Zeitgeist: In 1962, a nuclear confrontation seemed imminent. The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were embroiled in the Cuban missile crisis. Both were in the process of building hair-trigger nuclear ballistic missile systems. Each country pondered post-nuclear attack scenarios. U.S. authorities considered ways to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. How could any sort of “command and control network” survive? Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, offered a solution: design a more robust communications network using “redundancy” and “digital” technology.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI think it's worth bringing up at this point that the famous "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." quote is true only for the layer 3 of the ISO/OSI stack. The Internet as most people understand it is layer 7, and is incredibly centralized.