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People do crank up a few gears when it's war time or generally threaten of their survivals. After all the original engineering was military engineering then aft
by teleforce 2y ago
People do crank up a few gears when it's war time or generally threaten of their survivals. After all the original engineering was military engineering then after the rest of engineering or engineering for common causes like building a bridge for civilians are called civil engineering.
For example, Fourier Transform was there but no one use it because it is too slow and there was no urgency to use it until the nuclear testings were common place. In order to detect underground nuclear testing there was an urgency to detect the events using Fourier Transform and voila Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was invented to speed up it up considerably without loosing the accuracy. Then we have Fast Inverse Fourier Transform and the rest is history.
Another great example was the need for robust command and control (C & C) during the Cold War. US military was looking for C & C infrastructure that can survive nuclear catastrophe and voila the Internet was invented. People keep denying this fact but since it's initially and fully funded by DARPA, it's kind of giving away the main motivations. The basic tenet of the Internet design is essentially to have a highly reliable communication in the face of nearly total or 99% infrastructure destruction. If I can recall correctly someone actually simulated the 99% infrastructure down scenario and the results US Internet is still working fine, and if someone know this report or publication please let me know the original source.
- tonyhart7 2y agowell I doubt that if there a nuclear war the internet would safe because its run on electricity, power plant and grid require extensive maintenance and this is all hard even on normal day to day basis
- teleforce 2y agoIt's a well known fact that after original Internet becoming very popular US military has their very own separated, isolated and operated military network based on the similar design of packet switching of the Internet for their own use cases. Since it's operated by military they can make the networks infrastructure military grade and make the power supply to be fully redundant, but then Cold War was turned into just propaganda machine so perhaps there is no real motivation to make it really reliable. It's also a very common practices in many countries to have isolated and reliable nationwide network infrastructure for emergency usages for example disaster management purposes including military operations.
- petra 2y agoPower generation is relatively disributed today, with solar and wind. Big telecom infrastructure usually has backup power. And there's power-over-fiber as an alternative power grid for telecom(altough not sure how often used).
- anvuong 2y agoThe Internet is very funny. It's both incredibly reliable with insane amount of redundancy and extremely easy to screw up. A single bad BGP config can shut down the internet for a whole country ...