4 ms·
I'm finding that increasingly, whenever I read "X is a myth", it turns out to be mostly a myth. I guess it's a popular article form, it gets clicks, it doesn't
by codeflo 4y ago
I'm finding that increasingly, whenever I read "X is a myth", it turns out to be mostly a myth. I guess it's a popular article form, it gets clicks, it doesn't have to be completely true, right?
In this case, Wikipedia makes it pretty clear that while surviving a nuclear attack specifically might not have been an explicit part of the design goals of the designers (which may have started the myth myth), resilience against large-scale failures was exactly the feature that made the technology interesting to its military sponsors:
> Nonetheless, according to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development":
>> The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET -- where the quote is sourced directly to an article by this Stephen Lukasik.)
My takeaway is that while the ARPANET creators might not themselves have particularly cared about surviving nuclear disasters, without the completely decentralized packet switching that made this at least a possibility, it wouldn't have ever received the funding to get off the ground.
Shortening this fact to "ARPANET was funded to survive a nuclear attack" is IMO a fair sound-bite sized summary, not a "myth" to be debunked, even though the story has obviously more nuances.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoThat's a good way to put it. There's the habit of eliding all nuances in casual writing, especially for any large project as in reality there are multiple groups involved with some separation of interests and goals.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- cfmcdonald 4y agoThis is a good find. However I read through the key portions of the cited Lukasik article about the founding of ARPANET (pp. 10-12), and I can't find any real support for the claim in his introduction. He mentions the Baran RAND proposal and its survivability goals, but I saw no evidence provided that ARPA funded Taylor's ARPANET project because they thought it would help meet those same goals. It's also important to mention that Lukasik wrote this article in 2011, over 40 years after the fact, and that the claim you quote is contradicted by pretty much everyone else involved at the time, including Lukasik's boss at the time ARPANET was conceived, Charles Herzfeld (as cited in the same wikipedia article.)
- aidenn0 4y agoA lot of research from ~1960-1990 seemed to be "How can I make <idea I want to work on> sound like something the DoD would like to fund"
- Fnoord 4y agoLike Stargate Project [1], involving former Scientologist Ingo Swann. It got terminated in 1995. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
- noboostforyou 4y ago> I'm finding that increasingly, whenever I read "X is a myth", it turns out to be mostly a myth. I guess it's a popular article form, it gets clicks, it doesn't have to be completely true, right? Betteridge's law - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- aaron695 4y ago