The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false. As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It's uncited in the book, I've got a copy.

The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false. As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It's uncited in the book, I've got a copy. Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil in 1975 and you'd have no way of knowing if it was real. And then it would traverse in a nondeterministic unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can get it there with no way of knowing whether it succeeded or whether the message received was the message sent. It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing and it ran mostly on minicomputers, not even mainframes. All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly 0 were on military bases. The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at, technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor, Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None of this suggests military purpose Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email, rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use? It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through IIASA, you know, cause that's how cold war things happened - open door policy to the enemy Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic to pass through it. In 1997, a misbehaving router singlehandedly took down the net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident any enemy could have easily done this. Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just anyone - extremely valuable information for your enemies. Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel lookup tool. You could use it to get people's schedule, all the people who work under them, what they're doing, how to contact them, where they last logged in at - do you know what I'd really like to have as your military enemy? Heck let's cite Wikipedia as if reality matters: "20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with." Sending out spies, espionage, sabotage, all unnecessary if you're enemy is using this technology. You could do it all from a terminal. There's zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking. Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I'm committed to reality far more than being popular. My politics are on the far left btw, that's why I demand such high standards from these people. They're supposedly playing for my team. But let me tell you, they don't seem to care either.