12 ms·

Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)

224 points by edward 2y ago

bell-cot 2y ago
Obviously applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines But who cares? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool
- consumer451 2y ago
  The interesting thing from the first link is the Studies section, which indicates that Betteridge's Law is generally not accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    True. But referencing his "Law" is still a humorous way to summarize an article in an HN comment.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Accurate?
  - Spare_account 2y ago
    Are All Generalisations False?
    - fragmede 2y ago
      I mean, basically.
Aardwolf 2y ago
How about banking infrastructure and data? (I know I know, the answer is banks are the least of your concern after a nuclear war)
- ot1138 2y ago
  Banks would actually be of primary concern after a nuclear war. Without them, there would be little economy to speak of.
jgrahamc 2y ago
No.
- ihateurstack 2y ago
  [flagged]
farceSpherule 2y ago
As Al Gore.
- dr-detroit 2y ago
  [dead]
amelius 2y ago
If it is never tested we can safely assume that no, it doesn't work.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Judging from some of the outages I've lived through, the Internet or at least the web is not even designed to have a billion people using it
hypeatei 2y ago
Probably not. Most government agencies (e.g. FEMA) aren't prepared to handle the aftermath of one let alone backbone infrastructure. In the US, only high ranking government officials and STRATCOM are operating during a nuclear attack. Everyone else is on their own.
WaitWaitWha 2y ago
A solution can have more than one benefit or perceived positive outcome. We were able to use system time between universities and (we believed) it could also survive a nuke attack.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mrighele 2y ago
I don't think that the Internet was created to survive a nuclear strike, but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike, that was one of the reason that packet switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at the time, circuit switching). The idea of packet switching as a way make a communication network more robust came to Paul Baran a few years earlier, and while it was not the basis of Arpanet, it probably influenced it. Wikipedia [1] is not the best of the sources, but it sums it up nicely: "After joining the RAND Corporation in 1959, Baran took on the task of designing a "survivable" communications system that could maintain communication between end points in the face of damage from nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Then, most American military communications used high-frequency connections, which could be put out of action for many hours by a nuclear attack. [...] After proving survivability, Baran and his team needed to show proof of concept for that design so that it could be built. [...] The result was one of the first store-and-forward data layer switching protocols, a link-state/distance vector routing protocol, and an unproved connection-oriented transport protocol. Explicit detail of the designs can be found in the complete series of reports On Distributed Communications, published by RAND in 1964. [...] The Distributed Network that Baran introduced was intended to route around damage. [...] In 1969, when the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started developing the idea of an internetworked set of terminals to share computing resources, the reference materials that they considered included Baran and the RAND Corporation's "On Distributed Communications" volumes. The resiliency of a packet-switched network that uses link-state routing protocols, which are used on the Internet, stems in some part from the research to develop a network that could survive a nuclear attack." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran
- euroderf 2y ago
  AUTODIN preceded it, but ARPANET won out over AUTODIN II.
  - PROMISE_237 2y ago
    [dead]
  - esafak 2y ago
gargalatas 2y ago
Well how deep a nuclear assault can reach? In Greece there are some witnesses saying that the major internet provider backbone fiber was found buried 10cm below the road. Just after the asphalt inside the pebble.
- theideaofcoffee 2y ago
  Google Fiber was infamous for doing it this way, called "microtrenching" or "nanotrenching", where they either cut a trench into pavement and lay the cable into that and fill over with asphalt or other material. When done poorly (read: most of the installs that they've done), it erodes the road surface and the base and causes all sorts of problems [0] [1] [2] [3] Also lots of providers just string up cable on poles, which are routinely snagged by trucks, shot by ammunition, run into by cars, etc etc, so even more vulnerable than shallow burial. Some of these cables are major links so damage can cause wide-reaching problems. No match for an out of control sedan, let along a nuclear strike. [4] [5] [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-fiber-is-using-a-secret-weapon-to-outpace-at-t-and-other-gigabit-competitors/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-fiber-is-using-a... [1] https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-saying-i-told-you-so-about-buried-cables/ https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-say... [2] https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/google-trenches-eroding-in-nashville-roadways/article_b2b0fa16-61fe-11ed-9584-872aa97bb96c.html https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/google-tre... [3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/google-fiber-exits-louisville-after-shoddy-installs-left-exposed-wires-in-roads/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl... [4] https://www.wmur.com/article/crash-manchester-comcast-service-new-hampshire-1423/42400134 https://www.wmur.com/article/crash-manchester-comcast-servic... [5] https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/crash-vandalism-comcast-outage-citrus-heights/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/crash-vandalism-comc... and etc
- LinuxBender 2y ago
  Well how deep a nuclear assault can reach? Each hop of the internet uses power. The power infrastructure is above ground for long enough to be overpowered by nukes. So even if the internet were entirely under ground and even if it were entirely only fiber it would need an underground-only power feed coming from an underground-only power generation source. Most internet service providers are above ground. Some telco is underground but only useful for old pots lines and some DS lines. Satellite ground station relays are above ground. Power plants are above ground. Solar panels are above ground. I could be wrong, so after a nuclear event we should all try updating this thread assuming M5 Computer Security is EMP hardened and has backup power and a fuel contract with a fuel company that still exists. Most data-centers are not EMP hardened.
spcebar 2y ago
I strongly recommend Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which this article cites a lot. Fascinating history of ARPANET and building the infrastructure at BBN (on the team was Will Crowther of Colossal Cave Adventure fame!). Inspiring book in the same genre as Soul of a New Machine.
ctstover 2y ago
fyi - that font is almost illegible on chrome on x11 @ 96dpi
RegnisGnaw 2y ago
My understanding was that it was designed so that traffic could route around the destroyed segments. So if 9 out of the 10 routes between Lawrence Livermore and say MIT was destroyed, it would route traffic via the last route. Obviously if Lawrence Livermore is destroyed, this is all moot. Also you have to remember back then the nukes were smaller.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > Also you have to remember back then the nukes were smaller. I always had the impression they actually got smaller, as more precise targeting reduces the need for higher yields. If you know your bomb will detonate inside a building, you might as well use a conventional warhead and avoid all the diplomatic fallout of nuking someone.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Who needs nukes when you've got the flying ginsu? <https://apnews.com/article/hellfire-r9x-al-zawahri-d0d25b7ed4059750b4add024322fe17c https://apnews.com/article/hellfire-r9x-al-zawahri-d0d25b7ed...> Yes, more precise targeting / flight controls means smaller warheads, or simply kinetic-kill munitions. Shaped charges also pack a punch depending on where your delivery is intended. And of course, there is a nuclear version of same: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge>
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      > And of course, there is a nuclear version of same: Sounds useful for demolition.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        The Casaba-Howitzer was the weaponised application, apparently intended as a beam weapon. The mind boggles at what a nuclear shaped charge might accomplish. The other use envisioned was for Project Orion, the nuclear-bomb-powered spaceship proposal. Directed blast would make for more efficient propulsion, it seems.
ape4 2y ago
Also designed to survive a rogue backhoe (digging up a cable)
lasermike026 2y ago
In theory the internet was designed to be fault tolerant and highly available. No bombs required.
- dr-detroit 2y ago
  [dead]
localfirst 2y ago
That's the narrative. Just like Tor's narrative is that it helps America's spies communicate from hostile jurisdictions. The former never got the attention as back then we had monoculture shaped by mainstream media (no other alternatives) and we just ate up whatever we were told. The latter appears to be under more scrutiny lately, leading us to believe this is just like the lofty idea that VPN encryption is completely anonymous from the big five. Spies operating out of China or Russia would never use VPN or Tor? That would be painting a red target on their backs. So I wonder what the true intention is for Tor as is the mysterious origin of Bitcoin and so many other things. We won't know. One thing is for sure, what we believed to be bastions of Western democracy and privacy are no more.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  If there is a global passive adversary, I'd still rather use Tor so that sites don't see my IP and my ISP doesn't see my domain lookups
  - localfirst 2y ago
    If you use Tor without VPN as most do, it won't be your ISP that sees your domain lookups mate If you do use VPN with Tor as some do, it won't be your ISP either. We have an illusion of privacy because there is no true privacy anymore with digital technology and without privacy we don't have true freedom and as such we only live in a democracy in name only.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      Well either way please vote blue. If neither party offers privacy, at least one offers me some other rights
      - localfirst 2y ago
        What do you mean?
- 2y ago
rambojohnson 2y ago
yes
ricksunny 2y ago
I mean, no horse in this race or anything but sometimes there are informal reasons why a project gets funded. Getting the five-star to sign off some of their budget on something new and uncertain may require the backroom, unpublished message passed, 'because nukes make go boom'. I'm all for the founding fathers of the internet asserting that it wasn't a cold war imperative, on citeable paper, but that doesn't out-of-hand invalidate somebody's assertion that the culture motivating grant funding in the halls of defense at the time was continuity of government or C&C during the armageddon that everyone was anticipating.
Tiberium 2y ago
Kind of offtopic, but the font on the website seems really bad for me on both my phone and PC. Thankfully reading mode exists.
nostrademons 2y ago
There's a bunch of good stuff on YouTube from the folks who actually developed the Internet. Here's a couple from Leonard Kleinrock, whose MIT thesis laid out much of the math behind packet switching and whose lab sent the first Internet message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuiBTJZfeo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuiBTJZfeo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHpwcZiEW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHpwcZiEW4 And from Bob Kahn, who designed the router of that early Internet (interviewed by Vint Cerf, who invented TCP/IP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxNMTVnBzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxNMTVnBzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZ6tJcQpcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZ6tJcQpcI A key innovation of the Internet was packet-switching. Previous networks like AT&T's telephone system were circuit-switched: the configuration of the network, and route between source and destination, is an inherent property of the network, and once a connection is established it can't be easily reconfigured. Packet-switching makes the source and destination a property of the message, and then the network is responsible for figuring out a route from source to destination. Notably, because all information needed to specify the destination is included in the message, it can be retried or take a totally different route. Most things have multiple causes, and the Internet is definitely one of them. The scalability and distribution properties were certainly one of them: a centralized system like the telephone network cannot scale to new uses and many new endpoints the way a distributed system like the Internet can. According to Kleinrock, the need for management to keep an eye on all the research they were funding was apparently another one of them. But given that it was funded by DARPA, the resilience of a packet-switched network to scenarios where individual circuits might go down was probably a major reason for the interest in this technology. It doesn't necessarily have to be a nuclear strike, but there were a number of scenarios of interest to RAND and DARPA that could involve a portion of the nation's communication network being disabled and still needing to get messages through. This is also a good lesson to designers of future networks and computing systems. The end-to-end principle remains as valuable to system designers today as it did in the 1960s.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some previous discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256
PROMISE_237 2y ago
[dead]
ot1138 2y ago
Interesting story but I have a bit of anecdotal evidence to share. Back when I was a Freshman at UIUC in 1989, I was given a campus tour and told that one of the buildings there was designed to collapse outwardly in order to protect the equipment in the basement. That equipment was a national computer network (not yet called the internet!) So at the very least, the origin of this story predates 1991 by at least two years. I don't recall the name of the building but here it is on Google maps. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91.02h,100.83t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAF1QipNu9GptL2VGFLKCWJ4bovQW_VNNSjHmRflnjQwu!2e10!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNu9GptL2VGFLKCWJ4bovQW_VNNSjHmRflnjQwu%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi-10.831392060009762-ya91.05644164854141-ro0-fo90!7i6720!8i3360?coh=205410&entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91... Edit: It's not clear from my original comment but the reason for collapse would presumably be a nuclear strike. I remember this because this was a time when we grew up with a constant fear of a Russian nuclear strike and I couldn't help but wonder why anyone on earth would want to nuke Champaign. Edit: Ah, here we go! It is the Foreign Languages Building (FLB), later renamed. I remember having to trudge here at 7ams on snowy winter days to listen to Japanese language cassettes. https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincampus/flb/ https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam... Edit: And here's a contemporary article about the FLB, which also cited some of the crazy rumors about this building. https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png
- conductr 2y ago
  I wonder how long that equipment would survive being exposed to the elements after the collapse
  - ot1138 2y ago
    My guess is that something that important was protected by reinforced ceilings/floors.
    - conductr 2y ago
      It's not easy to make things stay waterproof after such an event. Water will find a way. The simplest thing will likely be the Achilles heel of such thoughtful engineering.
YaBa 2y ago
In theory yes, however, in pratical terms you just need to "bomb" the right places and 90% of the communications would be gone for quite a while. Think PIX and DNS root servers, destroy those, and only minor services would be available. There are countries with a single PIX, sitting in regular rooms without any kind of security, unplug those and the whole country would be offline (to be fair, intra-ISP traffic would work). And there's no need to go that far (bombing places), a bad actor that can cut some submarine fiber in the right places would cripple the whole world. Or just someone messing up BGP config in a big ISP, no need to bomb or destroy anything, a single bad command can cause major issues worldwide (had happened before).
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The Internet as it is now is structured to maximize the profits of the Internet service providers. This results in a structure very different from what was conceived originally for the purpose of being resilient to partial destruction. For the latter purpose, the best structure is a decentralized mesh with mostly equivalent links, which is much less economical than what the Internet uses now, i.e. a hierarchy of links of increasing throughputs that concentrates the traffic into few very high-speed links that pass through central high-capacity routers, so that the parts of the network where most of the traffic is concentrated are very vulnerable and their destruction would affect everybody.
ranger_danger 2y ago
The first digital computer was created to calculate army firing tables, but the first program they ended up running was for studying, in true WarGames style... global thermonuclear war. That's right... computers, the internet, GPS, weather satellites, it was all for war. Paid for by the US and other world governments. So the next time someone says "but Tor came from the government!" you can tell them this.
einpoklum 2y ago
It does not matter all that whether the Internet, let alone ARPAnet, was created for that purpose. And the reason is that "The Internet" is not built and implemented by a single authority nor a fully-harmonized set of independent entities; and many/most of those are not committed to initial Internet design goals. They're trying to promote their own interests - commercial, governmental etc. - within the framework of the requirements they need to meet to operate recognized autonomous systems and participate in the higher-level routing using BGP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol Do ASes get set up while maintaining/buttressing nuclear-strike resilience of the inter-AS network overall? I'm rather doubtful. Do ASes get set up so that there's nuclear-strike resilience within the AS? Absolutely not. I mean, some might, but you're welcome to ask your typical ISP, or commercial corporation whether they plan for that. ---- ... and that's before we mention the tendency in recent years for most (?) of the traffic to focus on a relatively small number of large "platform-website" providers, like Google, Facebook, and others, and their counterparts in China, Russia and elsewhere. While those have their own resilience goals - it is entirely up to them whether they want to plan for continued operations past a nuclear strike.
palisade 2y ago
Licklider who established the Intergalactic Computer Network memo that started it all. And, who was heavily involved in ARPAnet and bringing in all the people involved including Baran and Davies. Specifically mentions ARPAnet Command and Control in his paper. At the beginning he says, "The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been assigned a new task that must be activated immediately, and I must devote the whole of the coming week to it." And, then goes on to say. "It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA’s Command-and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA’s basic interest in these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming into existence." https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff... It is strange the the article tries to start by saying it had nothing to do with Baran's research into bomb resilient switching. But, actually they relied heavily on his research and actually Davies roped him in when designing the early ARPA and Internet. Hence, it is based on his bomb resilient switching, and therefore was based on ideas that were meant to survive a nuclear strike. "You and I share a common view of what packet switching is all about, since you and I independently came up with the same ingredients. ... and [you were] the first to reduce it to practice." - Paul Baran to Davies Davies also got his start at Tube Alloys project in UK and worked at NPL, in nuclear weapon related projects. I guess you could argue that beyond that they didn't really think much about it further. But, I somehow doubt that they weren't thinking about it as they continued. Kahn was heavily involved in the project and he also created the Strategic Computing Initiative, which among its many other goals also funded supercomputing for large scale simulation of atomic bombs. A nuclear war was very much on the mind of everyone involved. This whole article feels like a misinformation propaganda piece. For what purpose I don't know. The website is registered in Reykjavik, Iceland and hosted in Oklahoma. Which doesn't really tell me much.
- camtarn 2y ago
  From the article: "Also there’s a conspiracy tendency when it comes to grim folklore. Perhaps people denying the nuclear war connection have a political agenda, they were misinformed or they are too scared to admit it. It has its own defense built in that permits people trying to correct the narrative to be dismissed as trying to push an opinion or occluded political agenda." Not saying that that disproves it, but it's somewhat amusing that it's lampshaded directly in the source that you feel might be propaganda.
liotier 2y ago
The Internet ? No. The Arpanet ? Also no. But SAGE was - its prototype (the Cape Cod air defense project) was a packet-switching network and SAGE itself was as well... And staying up on doomsday for a bit of nuclear combat was the essence of SAGE's functional specification. SAGE pioneered most of the concepts and technologies of the Arpanet, whose purpose was absolutely not combat, so it is easy to imagine how the nuclear strike resilient Internet urban legend evolved.
xeromal 2y ago
Is anyone struggling to read the font? I have a 34 inch 4k ultrawide if that makes a difference.
swader999 2y ago
Ok internet, now do boat anchors.
AlbertCory 2y ago
Nearly all the Internet founders who are still alive are on the internet-history mailing list, which is still active. Vint is, for instance. The author goes on and on about the 90's, I think because that is easier to document than the 60's. Tracing the evolution of the "nuclear" narrative back then -- who cares? This article is a whole lot of research proving nothing except the vapidity of the media. The ARPANET did get started in the 60's, and packet-switching to provide "multiple paths in case one is destroyed" was indeed one of the motivations. Then it took on a life of its own and no one devoted any more thought to nuclear war. mrighele's answer is excellent.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
atulatul 2y ago
Does flash photography harm the internet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns
palisade 2y ago
Found it!!! The proof that ARPAnet was based on the idea of command and control! Command & Control means a network capable of surviving a nuclear attack. Licklider who established the Intergalactic Computer Network memo that started it all. And, who was heavily involved in ARPAnet and bringing in all the people involved including Baran and Davies. Specifically mentions ARPAnet Command and Control in his paper! "It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA’s Command-and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA’s basic interest in these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming into existence." https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Affiliates_of_the_Intergalactic_Computer_Network.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff...
- throw0101a 2y ago
  Instead of quoting from the end of that document, perhaps quote from the beginning: > In the first place, it is evident that we have among us a collection of individual (personal and/or organizational) aspirations, efforts, activities, and projects. These have in common, I think, the characteristics that they are in some way connected with advancement of the art or technology of information processing, the advancement of intellectual capability (man, man-machine, or machine), and the approach to a theory of science. The word "military" only exists in the last few paragraphs of the document. Most of it is about workflows and resource sharing: > When the computer operated the programs for me, I suppose that the activity took place in the computer at SDC, which is where we have been assuming I was. However, I would just as soon leave that on the level of inference. With a sophisticated network-control system, I would not decide whether to send the data and have them worked on by programs somewhere else, or bring in programs and have them work on my data. I have no great objection to making that decision, for a while at any rate, but, in principle, it seems better for the computer, or the network, somehow, to do that. At the end of my work, I filed some things away, and tried to do it in such a way that they would be useful to others. That called into play, presumably, some kind of a convention-monitoring system that, in its early stages, must almost surely involve a human criterion as well asmaching [sic.] processing.
Sparkyte 2y ago
No. There are massive ISP trunks that have accidentally been destroyed knocking out internet for hundreds of people.
surfingdino 2y ago
It was designed to survive a nuclear strike, but since the TCP/IP stack offers no protection against a backhoe or a shovel cutting the cables, I'm skeptical about such claims.
- rvnx 2y ago
  It sounds like a mastermind plan, but in reality it's a consequence of a global intelligence working together on the same project over xx years. It was certainly not designed with that much hindsight, otherwise we would never have had the infamous BGP-spoofing attacks (which were basic and easy at the time), the ARP-spoofing, not enough IPv4, etc. Internet has iteratively evolved to be reliable, as each iteration has improved on top of the previous one. And this is not due to geniuses, this is due to sys/netadmins who want to sleep at night more, so they are forced to choose and operate reliable techs.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    It's a great way to sell it and it worked. Fortunately, the product (the internet) works even better that the slogan used to sell it. One derivative claim, "the internet treats censorship and routes around it" is not used much these days, but I do remember it actually being close to reality, for a brief moment in time.
- edm0nd 2y ago
  These days its more like an anchor from a ship cutting a sea cable. Interesting to think about in the event of something like WW3, would these be some of the first things severed?
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    Absolutely. The are the spine of the world's communication, cut them and no more global internet.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
In terms of what could bring the internet down, unrestrained capitalism is far more of a uniform existential danger and will destroy the internet long before a nuclear strike does.
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
I notice the title has changed. HN title is "Was the internet created to survive a nuclear strike?", but the web page's current title is "Was the internet designed to survive a nuclear attack?" Cars were designed to hold drink cups. They weren't created to hold drink cups, but at this point in the history of the development of cars, they do hold drink cups by design.
austin-cheney 2y ago
Irrespective of nuclear war the design goal was always to create a network of redundant nodes across wide geographical dispersion. That solves two problems: 1. Increases network durability. 2. Allows uninterrupted participation by geographically separated parties. This is a hallmark of military technology still very much in use today and it goes as far back as the mid-1860s when the new US Army Signal Corps began experimenting with and integrating into conflict locations the first electronic communication technologies. Geographically dispersed redundancies are still import to military communications. On a tactical level this typically involves things like radio relays on hilltops, tropospheric shots, and various line of sight technologies. On the strategic level it involves having multiple routes through the internet over different kinds of physical media moving in different geographic directions. You don't see this as much in the commercial world, because sending network traffic through less efficient routes is slow and costly, so redundancies are only an emergency fallback. From a military perspective the network will go down at any moment, so slow and expensive are still favorable to disconnection. As a result the military will eagerly employ many layers of many redundant options. Cost is a less significant factor for the military since they are the only ones to own all layers of their own stack and thus able to operate in isolation.
juliandicarlo11 2y ago
[dead]
Merrill 2y ago
The benefits of a research project as described to the funding authority and the benefits of a research project after it is done are often not the same.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Was the internet designed to survive a nuclear attack? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256 - Oct 2022 (115 comments) HN: Was the internet designed to resist nuclear attacks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415376 - July 2019 (3 comments)
limit499karma 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cadence- 2y ago
The original creators of the early version of the Internet wanted it to be open and equal, making sure one entity couldn't control it. The fact that this design also would be helpful after a nuclear attack was used to get the required funding from the US military.
jcrawfordor 2y ago
I'm an enthusiast and writer on the history of military communications technology, particularly during the Cold War. The internet is very much part of this story, and I am asked about this controversy from time to time. The problem is, I find that people who argue for both positions are becoming much too fixated on the idea that there was some single set of influences on a complex project. There isn't really any answer to "was the internet designed to withstand nuclear war" for the same reason that there isn't really any single answer to any question about the historical motivations of complex undertakings. That's just not how history works. There are some facts which we know to be true: 1) Various components of the defense complex were actively researching survivable C2 communications, particularly beginning in the 1950s although there were earlier precedents. Many of these efforts involved ideas that were similar to those used in modern computer networking, and they sometimes culminated in built systems with meaningful similarities to the internet, like AUTODIN. 2) A diverse cast of academics, contractors, and government entities were involved in these projects. Sometimes the same people worked on multiple projects. Even when they didn't, there were often communications between these entities, but sometimes, due to security concerns, there wasn't. Much of this communication was informal, so in retrospect it is hard to tell who knew what. There can be surprises both directions. 3) Communications technologies often emerge naturally from innovations in other fields, technical advances, etc., so while many similar communications technologies have a shared intellectual heritage, it is also not that unusual for totally independent efforts to arrive at roughly the same point. Radio is a classic example. I think that, in consideration of these facts, we can reach two conclusions: A) It seems likely that some of the people involved in ARPANET were familiar with survivable C2 research and applied those ideas to their efforts. After all, lots of people and lots of organizations worked on these programs, and some of the research was widely distributed within the defense-industrial-academic complex during the '50s and '60s. B) It also seems likely that ARPANET independently arrived at similar endpoints. After all, it had some similar constraints and objectives, and its creators were working with mostly the same underlying technology. These two do not contradict each other. In fact, I think it is by far most likely that both are true in the cases of different individual people and different individual aspects of the design. That's just how these things are. Before considering The Internet specifically, let's consider a couple of similar situations in the development of technology: 1) People sometimes do a great deal of hand-wringing over the assignment of labels like "the first programmable computer." I have always been very wary of giving these sorts of titles without a fair number of weasel words. Consider, for example, the ENIAC, usually called the "first programmable computer." And yet, there is a compelling argument that a number of the substantial design elements of ENIAC, including its programmability, are derived from work done for an earlier codebreaking machine called Colossus. This connection remained unknown for many years because of the secrecy surrounding Colossus... a level of secrecy that means that, while a number of people who worked on Colossus and later worked on ENIAC almost certainly carried over ideas, they wouldn't have admitted to having done so as Colossus was officially unknown to the ENIAC project. The particular climate of wartime and military technological development means that ideas often move around in subtle ways, and knowledge of where an idea came from is intentionally obscured. The history of military technology can be a very difficult field for this reason. 2) Almost at the opposite ends of the spectrum, information often flows very freely in academic and industrial laboratory environments, and so ideas spread without clear documentation. I am reminded of a piece I wrote years ago, on the fact that several early internet protocols use a similar set of three-digit status codes in similar ways (HTTP, for example). Oddly enough, these pseudo-standard status codes appear almost simultaneously in RJE and FTP, but neither mentions the other. Over time I have been lucky enough to get in touch with several of the authors of both RFCs, and while none of them can recall the origin of the codes, they agree with my general theory: the two separate groups, both at MIT, had just shared notes during the development of the protocols and one of them informally adopted the status code scheme from the other. People talk to each other, and ideas often move between projects without formal documentation. So, with those two examples of subtle cross-project influence in mind, can we say anything suggestive about ARPANET? Well, there are certain suggestive details. For example, by the time ARPANET's first IMPs were built, at least one researcher (Howard Frank) was engaged in ARPANET research who had previously consulted on survivable C2 networks. But the ARPANET project had already set certain design details like packet-switching by that point... which raises the question of if packet-switching is even the important part. Howard Frank wasn't working on packet switching itself, he was working on performance and reliability modeling of topologies for packet switching, an area where military C2 research was probably generally ahead of ARPANET research at that time. So, if we take the face-value assumption that aspects of ARPANET topology research were probably based on survivable C2 research, does that mean that ARPANET was "created to survive a nuclear strike?" Or did it merely end up that way? It ends up coming down to splitting hairs about what "created" means, an exercise that sort of ignores the fact that technological developments always combine established ideas and new ones. ARPANET was not built for military C2. It was used for military C2 later on, but during the early days of ARPANET the military had more wide-area networking initiatives than you could shake a stick at and ARPANET was not one of the ones contracted for C2 purposes. Was ARPANET designed for nuclear survivability? The most obvious answer is "no," because the early topology of ARPANET lacked the level of redundancy in its topology that actual survivable networks of the era had. But, this seems to have been more a consequence of funding and resource availability than intentions, because ARPANET researchers had done plenty of work on performance and reliability, using basically the same methods as used for survivable networks. So maybe, at the end of the day, the "best" answer to this is sort of a boring one: meh. Nuclear survivability was obviously not a goal of ARPANET because ARPANET did not build out a survivable network. That said, ARPANET incorporated most of the technical ideas from survivable networks of the era. It is a virtual certainty that ARPANET got some of those ideas from earlier and simultaneous research into survivable networks, but it is also a virtual certainty that ARPANET arrived at some of them independently. If you consider "packet switching" to be the main technical advancement of ARPANET, it's probably not an idea that ARPANET got from survivable C2 research, because the historical record looks pretty confident that multiple people independently arrived at packet switching. That ought not to be surprising to anyone, because packet switching is a fairly direct evolution of practices established in radio and telegraph networks almost fifty years before. But, I also think it's an unnecessarily restrictive view of ARPANET's technical contributions, and other aspects of ARPANET like routing policy were definitely influenced by survivable communications research and, to some extent, directly based on survivability work. What all this means about why ARPANET was "created" or what it was "designed" for is strictly a matter of how you interpret those words. Yes, articles and books and etc. should not repeat the claim that "the Internet was created to survive a nuclear strike," because the truth and falsity of that statement requires a lengthy and nuanced explanation. When we express history as simple facts we should try to stick to the ones that are, like, 90% true, instead of like 50% true. But "facts" about history are rarely 100% true, we're just not that lucky. It all happened a long time ago, there were a lot of people involved, different people were doing different things, it's a tangled mess of motivations and influences. That's why we study it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Postscript: Also, packet-switching is not at all intrinsic to survivable networks, although certainly survivability lead to a lot of advancements in packet-switching. But there were also a lot of circuit-switched survivable networks, and for a good span of the Cold War, I would say that circuit-switching outnumbered packet-switching for hardened C2. You'll notice that AT&T, the military's #1 choice for hardened communications, was firmly not on the packet switching side of things. But the military also contracted C2 projects to Western Union, who were basically arriving at modern packet switching by their own route (automated telegraph routing). This schism, between packet-switching and circuit-switching, remains a critical part of the data communications story today.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
I found this article difficult to read and confusing. In the title "... a nuclear strike". In the article: "... not kept in bunkers.. but on regular computers". Well is the idea to survive nuclear armageddon, or to survive a strike? A strike can take out a city if that happens the network continues to function - whatever nodes were just lost. Having everything inside a hardened bunker is not required. In so far as nuclear armageddon, I am not sure that having computers inside bunkers would help keep the internet up given it requires wiring or wireless infrastructure to communicate. If Having computer systems still operate, even on their own, then a bunker starts naking sense.
- runlevel1 2y ago
  > A strike can take out a city if that happens the network continues to function - whatever nodes were just lost. That's true up to a limit. Regional consolidation of ISPs have led to centralization. For instance, the 2020 Nashville AT&T building bombing caused a fairly widespread outage of phone and internet spread across 5 states. It took quite a lot of work to restore service despite most of the switching equipment not being damaged. Take out a few critical interconnection/peering points and you could have something of an internet Kessler Syndrome as a thundering herd of traffic was routed over overlapping, lower-preference routes. It would take a great deal of work by a relatively small group of people to stabilize. Work made more difficult from problems communicating, and many of the network engineers are not going to be local to the equipment they manage. Not to mention how something like that would surface all kinds of previously unforeseen bidirectional dependencies.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Norway was the first nation outside of the US to get connected to the Arpanet¹³³. This was done to have for the US military to have "real-time" access to seismic data from sensors in Norway, that would detect nuclear activity of various forms. Primarily those in the Soviet Union. I can at least say ARPANET was expanded to Norway for military purposes. A family member of mine was the first foreigner to "chat" with folks in the US via ARPANET. And later given access to compute resources in the US, for work that was a bit hush hush. ¹ https://www.nb.no/en/story/da-norge-fikk-internett/#:~:text=As%20the%20second%20country%20in,and%20researchers%20in%20the%20US https://www.nb.no/en/story/da-norge-fikk-internett/#:~:text=.... ² https://www.norsar.no/about-us/history/arpanet https://www.norsar.no/about-us/history/arpanet ³ https://www.ffi.no/en/news/from-the-us-to-ffi-kjeller-was-first-online https://www.ffi.no/en/news/from-the-us-to-ffi-kjeller-was-fi...
aaron695 2y ago
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openrisk 2y ago
The more important modern question: was it designed to survive a software update?
pronoiac 2y ago
> I was unable to find a way to reach Ed Krol or Bruce Sterling ... Bruce Sterling was on Twitter when this was written, and I follow him on Mastodon now. I'll contact him there.
musha68k 2y ago
Weirdly self assured article? Still good someone is talking about history but let's not forget that securing the budget for all of this came out of the literal war chest of the US. Not an Elon fan but FWIW and AFAIK Starlink's usage during the current war in Ukraine is the fully realized DARPA plan of the last private (?) company in a long line providing internet infrastructure since ~ about 1983 when both TCP/IP and Reagan's general privatization efforts slowly started to "take over" and extend the academic internet. All for the purpose of warfare, everything else was extra. Including keeping Licklider and generations of hippies happy / happily designing and building / maintaining the early waves until businesses could take "the formulas" and go from there. Vint Cerf: > The earliest demonstration of the triple network Internet was in July 1977. We had several people involved. In order to link a mobile packet radio in the Bay Area, Jim Mathis was driving a van on the San Francisco Bayshore Freeway with a packet radio system running on an LSI-11. This was connected to a gateway developed by .i.Internet: history of: Strazisar, Virginia; Virginia Strazisar at BBN. Ginny was monitoring the gateway and had artificially adjusted the routing in the system. It went over the Atlantic via a point-to-point satellite link to Norway and down to London, by land line, and then back through the Atlantic Packet Satellite network (SATNET) through a Single Channel Per Carrier (SCPC) system, which had ground stations in Etam, West Virginia, Goonhilly Downs England, and Tanum, Sweden. The German and Italian sites of SATNET hadn't been hooked in yet. Ginny was responsible for gateways from packet radio to ARPANET, and from ARPANET to SATNET. Traffic passed from the mobile unit on the Packet Radio network across the ARPANET over an internal point-to-point satellite link to University College London, and then back through the SATNET into the ARPANET again, and then across the ARPANET to the USC Information Sciences Institute to one of their DEC KA-10 (ISIC) machines. > So what we were simulating was someone in a mobile battlefield environment going across a continental network, then across an intercontinental satellite network, and then back into a wireline network to a major computing resource in national headquarters. Since the Defense Department was paying for this, we were looking for demonstrations that would translate to militarily interesting scenarios. So the packets were traveling 94,000 miles round trip, as opposed to what would have been an 800-mile round trip directly on the ARPANET. We didn't lose a bit! https://netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html https://netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html

224 points by edward 2y ago

Obviously applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines But who cares? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool

consumer451 2y ago
The interesting thing from the first link is the Studies section, which indicates that Betteridge's Law is generally not accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...
- bell-cot 2y ago
  True. But referencing his "Law" is still a humorous way to summarize an article in an HN comment.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Accurate?
- Spare_account 2y ago
  Are All Generalisations False?
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I mean, basically.

Aardwolf 2y ago

How about banking infrastructure and data? (I know I know, the answer is banks are the least of your concern after a nuclear war)

ot1138 2y ago
Banks would actually be of primary concern after a nuclear war. Without them, there would be little economy to speak of.

jgrahamc 2y ago

No.

ihateurstack 2y ago
[flagged]

farceSpherule 2y ago

As Al Gore.

dr-detroit 2y ago
[dead]

amelius 2y ago

If it is never tested we can safely assume that no, it doesn't work.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Judging from some of the outages I've lived through, the Internet or at least the web is not even designed to have a billion people using it

hypeatei 2y ago

Probably not. Most government agencies (e.g. FEMA) aren't prepared to handle the aftermath of one let alone backbone infrastructure. In the US, only high ranking government officials and STRATCOM are operating during a nuclear attack. Everyone else is on their own.

WaitWaitWha 2y ago

A solution can have more than one benefit or perceived positive outcome. We were able to use system time between universities and (we believed) it could also survive a nuke attack.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mrighele 2y ago

I don't think that the Internet was created to survive a nuclear strike, but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike, that was one of the reason that packet switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at the time, circuit switching). The idea of packet switching as a way make a communication network more robust came to Paul Baran a few years earlier, and while it was not the basis of Arpanet, it probably influenced it. Wikipedia [1] is not the best of the sources, but it sums it up nicely: "After joining the RAND Corporation in 1959, Baran took on the task of designing a "survivable" communications system that could maintain communication between end points in the face of damage from nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Then, most American military communications used high-frequency connections, which could be put out of action for many hours by a nuclear attack. [...] After proving survivability, Baran and his team needed to show proof of concept for that design so that it could be built. [...] The result was one of the first store-and-forward data layer switching protocols, a link-state/distance vector routing protocol, and an unproved connection-oriented transport protocol. Explicit detail of the designs can be found in the complete series of reports On Distributed Communications, published by RAND in 1964. [...] The Distributed Network that Baran introduced was intended to route around damage. [...] In 1969, when the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started developing the idea of an internetworked set of terminals to share computing resources, the reference materials that they considered included Baran and the RAND Corporation's "On Distributed Communications" volumes. The resiliency of a packet-switched network that uses link-state routing protocols, which are used on the Internet, stems in some part from the research to develop a network that could survive a nuclear attack." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran

euroderf 2y ago
AUTODIN preceded it, but ARPANET won out over AUTODIN II.
- PROMISE_237 2y ago
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- esafak 2y ago

gargalatas 2y ago

Well how deep a nuclear assault can reach? In Greece there are some witnesses saying that the major internet provider backbone fiber was found buried 10cm below the road. Just after the asphalt inside the pebble.

theideaofcoffee 2y ago
Google Fiber was infamous for doing it this way, called "microtrenching" or "nanotrenching", where they either cut a trench into pavement and lay the cable into that and fill over with asphalt or other material. When done poorly (read: most of the installs that they've done), it erodes the road surface and the base and causes all sorts of problems [0] [1] [2] [3] Also lots of providers just string up cable on poles, which are routinely snagged by trucks, shot by ammunition, run into by cars, etc etc, so even more vulnerable than shallow burial. Some of these cables are major links so damage can cause wide-reaching problems. No match for an out of control sedan, let along a nuclear strike. [4] [5] [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-fiber-is-using-a-secret-weapon-to-outpace-at-t-and-other-gigabit-competitors/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-fiber-is-using-a... [1] https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-saying-i-told-you-so-about-buried-cables/ https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-say... [2] https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/google-trenches-eroding-in-nashville-roadways/article_b2b0fa16-61fe-11ed-9584-872aa97bb96c.html https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/google-tre... [3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/google-fiber-exits-louisville-after-shoddy-installs-left-exposed-wires-in-roads/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl... [4] https://www.wmur.com/article/crash-manchester-comcast-service-new-hampshire-1423/42400134 https://www.wmur.com/article/crash-manchester-comcast-servic... [5] https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/crash-vandalism-comcast-outage-citrus-heights/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/crash-vandalism-comc... and etc
LinuxBender 2y ago
Well how deep a nuclear assault can reach? Each hop of the internet uses power. The power infrastructure is above ground for long enough to be overpowered by nukes. So even if the internet were entirely under ground and even if it were entirely only fiber it would need an underground-only power feed coming from an underground-only power generation source. Most internet service providers are above ground. Some telco is underground but only useful for old pots lines and some DS lines. Satellite ground station relays are above ground. Power plants are above ground. Solar panels are above ground. I could be wrong, so after a nuclear event we should all try updating this thread assuming M5 Computer Security is EMP hardened and has backup power and a fuel contract with a fuel company that still exists. Most data-centers are not EMP hardened.

spcebar 2y ago

I strongly recommend Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which this article cites a lot. Fascinating history of ARPANET and building the infrastructure at BBN (on the team was Will Crowther of Colossal Cave Adventure fame!). Inspiring book in the same genre as Soul of a New Machine.

ctstover 2y ago

fyi - that font is almost illegible on chrome on x11 @ 96dpi

RegnisGnaw 2y ago

My understanding was that it was designed so that traffic could route around the destroyed segments. So if 9 out of the 10 routes between Lawrence Livermore and say MIT was destroyed, it would route traffic via the last route. Obviously if Lawrence Livermore is destroyed, this is all moot. Also you have to remember back then the nukes were smaller.

rbanffy 2y ago
> Also you have to remember back then the nukes were smaller. I always had the impression they actually got smaller, as more precise targeting reduces the need for higher yields. If you know your bomb will detonate inside a building, you might as well use a conventional warhead and avoid all the diplomatic fallout of nuking someone.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Who needs nukes when you've got the flying ginsu? <https://apnews.com/article/hellfire-r9x-al-zawahri-d0d25b7ed4059750b4add024322fe17c https://apnews.com/article/hellfire-r9x-al-zawahri-d0d25b7ed...> Yes, more precise targeting / flight controls means smaller warheads, or simply kinetic-kill munitions. Shaped charges also pack a punch depending on where your delivery is intended. And of course, there is a nuclear version of same: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge>
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > And of course, there is a nuclear version of same: Sounds useful for demolition.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      The Casaba-Howitzer was the weaponised application, apparently intended as a beam weapon. The mind boggles at what a nuclear shaped charge might accomplish. The other use envisioned was for Project Orion, the nuclear-bomb-powered spaceship proposal. Directed blast would make for more efficient propulsion, it seems.

ape4 2y ago

Also designed to survive a rogue backhoe (digging up a cable)

lasermike026 2y ago

In theory the internet was designed to be fault tolerant and highly available. No bombs required.

dr-detroit 2y ago
[dead]

localfirst 2y ago

That's the narrative. Just like Tor's narrative is that it helps America's spies communicate from hostile jurisdictions. The former never got the attention as back then we had monoculture shaped by mainstream media (no other alternatives) and we just ate up whatever we were told. The latter appears to be under more scrutiny lately, leading us to believe this is just like the lofty idea that VPN encryption is completely anonymous from the big five. Spies operating out of China or Russia would never use VPN or Tor? That would be painting a red target on their backs. So I wonder what the true intention is for Tor as is the mysterious origin of Bitcoin and so many other things. We won't know. One thing is for sure, what we believed to be bastions of Western democracy and privacy are no more.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
If there is a global passive adversary, I'd still rather use Tor so that sites don't see my IP and my ISP doesn't see my domain lookups
- localfirst 2y ago
  If you use Tor without VPN as most do, it won't be your ISP that sees your domain lookups mate If you do use VPN with Tor as some do, it won't be your ISP either. We have an illusion of privacy because there is no true privacy anymore with digital technology and without privacy we don't have true freedom and as such we only live in a democracy in name only.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Well either way please vote blue. If neither party offers privacy, at least one offers me some other rights
    - localfirst 2y ago
      What do you mean?
2y ago

rambojohnson 2y ago

yes

ricksunny 2y ago

I mean, no horse in this race or anything but sometimes there are informal reasons why a project gets funded. Getting the five-star to sign off some of their budget on something new and uncertain may require the backroom, unpublished message passed, 'because nukes make go boom'. I'm all for the founding fathers of the internet asserting that it wasn't a cold war imperative, on citeable paper, but that doesn't out-of-hand invalidate somebody's assertion that the culture motivating grant funding in the halls of defense at the time was continuity of government or C&C during the armageddon that everyone was anticipating.

Tiberium 2y ago

Kind of offtopic, but the font on the website seems really bad for me on both my phone and PC. Thankfully reading mode exists.

nostrademons 2y ago

There's a bunch of good stuff on YouTube from the folks who actually developed the Internet. Here's a couple from Leonard Kleinrock, whose MIT thesis laid out much of the math behind packet switching and whose lab sent the first Internet message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuiBTJZfeo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuiBTJZfeo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHpwcZiEW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHpwcZiEW4 And from Bob Kahn, who designed the router of that early Internet (interviewed by Vint Cerf, who invented TCP/IP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxNMTVnBzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxNMTVnBzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZ6tJcQpcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZ6tJcQpcI A key innovation of the Internet was packet-switching. Previous networks like AT&T's telephone system were circuit-switched: the configuration of the network, and route between source and destination, is an inherent property of the network, and once a connection is established it can't be easily reconfigured. Packet-switching makes the source and destination a property of the message, and then the network is responsible for figuring out a route from source to destination. Notably, because all information needed to specify the destination is included in the message, it can be retried or take a totally different route. Most things have multiple causes, and the Internet is definitely one of them. The scalability and distribution properties were certainly one of them: a centralized system like the telephone network cannot scale to new uses and many new endpoints the way a distributed system like the Internet can. According to Kleinrock, the need for management to keep an eye on all the research they were funding was apparently another one of them. But given that it was funded by DARPA, the resilience of a packet-switched network to scenarios where individual circuits might go down was probably a major reason for the interest in this technology. It doesn't necessarily have to be a nuclear strike, but there were a number of scenarios of interest to RAND and DARPA that could involve a portion of the nation's communication network being disabled and still needing to get messages through. This is also a good lesson to designers of future networks and computing systems. The end-to-end principle remains as valuable to system designers today as it did in the 1960s.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Some previous discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256

PROMISE_237 2y ago

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ot1138 2y ago

Interesting story but I have a bit of anecdotal evidence to share. Back when I was a Freshman at UIUC in 1989, I was given a campus tour and told that one of the buildings there was designed to collapse outwardly in order to protect the equipment in the basement. That equipment was a national computer network (not yet called the internet!) So at the very least, the origin of this story predates 1991 by at least two years. I don't recall the name of the building but here it is on Google maps. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91.02h,100.83t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAF1QipNu9GptL2VGFLKCWJ4bovQW_VNNSjHmRflnjQwu!2e10!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNu9GptL2VGFLKCWJ4bovQW_VNNSjHmRflnjQwu%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi-10.831392060009762-ya91.05644164854141-ro0-fo90!7i6720!8i3360?coh=205410&entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91... Edit: It's not clear from my original comment but the reason for collapse would presumably be a nuclear strike. I remember this because this was a time when we grew up with a constant fear of a Russian nuclear strike and I couldn't help but wonder why anyone on earth would want to nuke Champaign. Edit: Ah, here we go! It is the Foreign Languages Building (FLB), later renamed. I remember having to trudge here at 7ams on snowy winter days to listen to Japanese language cassettes. https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincampus/flb/ https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam... Edit: And here's a contemporary article about the FLB, which also cited some of the crazy rumors about this building. https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png

conductr 2y ago
I wonder how long that equipment would survive being exposed to the elements after the collapse
- ot1138 2y ago
  My guess is that something that important was protected by reinforced ceilings/floors.
  - conductr 2y ago
    It's not easy to make things stay waterproof after such an event. Water will find a way. The simplest thing will likely be the Achilles heel of such thoughtful engineering.

YaBa 2y ago

In theory yes, however, in pratical terms you just need to "bomb" the right places and 90% of the communications would be gone for quite a while. Think PIX and DNS root servers, destroy those, and only minor services would be available. There are countries with a single PIX, sitting in regular rooms without any kind of security, unplug those and the whole country would be offline (to be fair, intra-ISP traffic would work). And there's no need to go that far (bombing places), a bad actor that can cut some submarine fiber in the right places would cripple the whole world. Or just someone messing up BGP config in a big ISP, no need to bomb or destroy anything, a single bad command can cause major issues worldwide (had happened before).

adrian_b 2y ago
The Internet as it is now is structured to maximize the profits of the Internet service providers. This results in a structure very different from what was conceived originally for the purpose of being resilient to partial destruction. For the latter purpose, the best structure is a decentralized mesh with mostly equivalent links, which is much less economical than what the Internet uses now, i.e. a hierarchy of links of increasing throughputs that concentrates the traffic into few very high-speed links that pass through central high-capacity routers, so that the parts of the network where most of the traffic is concentrated are very vulnerable and their destruction would affect everybody.

ranger_danger 2y ago

The first digital computer was created to calculate army firing tables, but the first program they ended up running was for studying, in true WarGames style... global thermonuclear war. That's right... computers, the internet, GPS, weather satellites, it was all for war. Paid for by the US and other world governments. So the next time someone says "but Tor came from the government!" you can tell them this.

einpoklum 2y ago

It does not matter all that whether the Internet, let alone ARPAnet, was created for that purpose. And the reason is that "The Internet" is not built and implemented by a single authority nor a fully-harmonized set of independent entities; and many/most of those are not committed to initial Internet design goals. They're trying to promote their own interests - commercial, governmental etc. - within the framework of the requirements they need to meet to operate recognized autonomous systems and participate in the higher-level routing using BGP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol Do ASes get set up while maintaining/buttressing nuclear-strike resilience of the inter-AS network overall? I'm rather doubtful. Do ASes get set up so that there's nuclear-strike resilience within the AS? Absolutely not. I mean, some might, but you're welcome to ask your typical ISP, or commercial corporation whether they plan for that. ---- ... and that's before we mention the tendency in recent years for most (?) of the traffic to focus on a relatively small number of large "platform-website" providers, like Google, Facebook, and others, and their counterparts in China, Russia and elsewhere. While those have their own resilience goals - it is entirely up to them whether they want to plan for continued operations past a nuclear strike.

palisade 2y ago

Licklider who established the Intergalactic Computer Network memo that started it all. And, who was heavily involved in ARPAnet and bringing in all the people involved including Baran and Davies. Specifically mentions ARPAnet Command and Control in his paper. At the beginning he says, "The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been assigned a new task that must be activated immediately, and I must devote the whole of the coming week to it." And, then goes on to say. "It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA’s Command-and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA’s basic interest in these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming into existence." https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff... It is strange the the article tries to start by saying it had nothing to do with Baran's research into bomb resilient switching. But, actually they relied heavily on his research and actually Davies roped him in when designing the early ARPA and Internet. Hence, it is based on his bomb resilient switching, and therefore was based on ideas that were meant to survive a nuclear strike. "You and I share a common view of what packet switching is all about, since you and I independently came up with the same ingredients. ... and [you were] the first to reduce it to practice." - Paul Baran to Davies Davies also got his start at Tube Alloys project in UK and worked at NPL, in nuclear weapon related projects. I guess you could argue that beyond that they didn't really think much about it further. But, I somehow doubt that they weren't thinking about it as they continued. Kahn was heavily involved in the project and he also created the Strategic Computing Initiative, which among its many other goals also funded supercomputing for large scale simulation of atomic bombs. A nuclear war was very much on the mind of everyone involved. This whole article feels like a misinformation propaganda piece. For what purpose I don't know. The website is registered in Reykjavik, Iceland and hosted in Oklahoma. Which doesn't really tell me much.

camtarn 2y ago
From the article: "Also there’s a conspiracy tendency when it comes to grim folklore. Perhaps people denying the nuclear war connection have a political agenda, they were misinformed or they are too scared to admit it. It has its own defense built in that permits people trying to correct the narrative to be dismissed as trying to push an opinion or occluded political agenda." Not saying that that disproves it, but it's somewhat amusing that it's lampshaded directly in the source that you feel might be propaganda.

liotier 2y ago

The Internet ? No. The Arpanet ? Also no. But SAGE was - its prototype (the Cape Cod air defense project) was a packet-switching network and SAGE itself was as well... And staying up on doomsday for a bit of nuclear combat was the essence of SAGE's functional specification. SAGE pioneered most of the concepts and technologies of the Arpanet, whose purpose was absolutely not combat, so it is easy to imagine how the nuclear strike resilient Internet urban legend evolved.

xeromal 2y ago

Is anyone struggling to read the font? I have a 34 inch 4k ultrawide if that makes a difference.

swader999 2y ago

Ok internet, now do boat anchors.

AlbertCory 2y ago

Nearly all the Internet founders who are still alive are on the internet-history mailing list, which is still active. Vint is, for instance. The author goes on and on about the 90's, I think because that is easier to document than the 60's. Tracing the evolution of the "nuclear" narrative back then -- who cares? This article is a whole lot of research proving nothing except the vapidity of the media. The ARPANET did get started in the 60's, and packet-switching to provide "multiple paths in case one is destroyed" was indeed one of the motivations. Then it took on a life of its own and no one devoted any more thought to nuclear war. mrighele's answer is excellent.

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atulatul 2y ago

Does flash photography harm the internet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns

palisade 2y ago

Found it!!! The proof that ARPAnet was based on the idea of command and control! Command & Control means a network capable of surviving a nuclear attack. Licklider who established the Intergalactic Computer Network memo that started it all. And, who was heavily involved in ARPAnet and bringing in all the people involved including Baran and Davies. Specifically mentions ARPAnet Command and Control in his paper! "It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA’s Command-and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA’s basic interest in these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming into existence." https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Affiliates_of_the_Intergalactic_Computer_Network.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff...

throw0101a 2y ago
Instead of quoting from the end of that document, perhaps quote from the beginning: > In the first place, it is evident that we have among us a collection of individual (personal and/or organizational) aspirations, efforts, activities, and projects. These have in common, I think, the characteristics that they are in some way connected with advancement of the art or technology of information processing, the advancement of intellectual capability (man, man-machine, or machine), and the approach to a theory of science. The word "military" only exists in the last few paragraphs of the document. Most of it is about workflows and resource sharing: > When the computer operated the programs for me, I suppose that the activity took place in the computer at SDC, which is where we have been assuming I was. However, I would just as soon leave that on the level of inference. With a sophisticated network-control system, I would not decide whether to send the data and have them worked on by programs somewhere else, or bring in programs and have them work on my data. I have no great objection to making that decision, for a while at any rate, but, in principle, it seems better for the computer, or the network, somehow, to do that. At the end of my work, I filed some things away, and tried to do it in such a way that they would be useful to others. That called into play, presumably, some kind of a convention-monitoring system that, in its early stages, must almost surely involve a human criterion as well asmaching [sic.] processing.

Sparkyte 2y ago

No. There are massive ISP trunks that have accidentally been destroyed knocking out internet for hundreds of people.

surfingdino 2y ago

It was designed to survive a nuclear strike, but since the TCP/IP stack offers no protection against a backhoe or a shovel cutting the cables, I'm skeptical about such claims.

rvnx 2y ago
It sounds like a mastermind plan, but in reality it's a consequence of a global intelligence working together on the same project over xx years. It was certainly not designed with that much hindsight, otherwise we would never have had the infamous BGP-spoofing attacks (which were basic and easy at the time), the ARP-spoofing, not enough IPv4, etc. Internet has iteratively evolved to be reliable, as each iteration has improved on top of the previous one. And this is not due to geniuses, this is due to sys/netadmins who want to sleep at night more, so they are forced to choose and operate reliable techs.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  It's a great way to sell it and it worked. Fortunately, the product (the internet) works even better that the slogan used to sell it. One derivative claim, "the internet treats censorship and routes around it" is not used much these days, but I do remember it actually being close to reality, for a brief moment in time.
edm0nd 2y ago
These days its more like an anchor from a ship cutting a sea cable. Interesting to think about in the event of something like WW3, would these be some of the first things severed?
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Absolutely. The are the spine of the world's communication, cut them and no more global internet.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

In terms of what could bring the internet down, unrestrained capitalism is far more of a uniform existential danger and will destroy the internet long before a nuclear strike does.

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

I notice the title has changed. HN title is "Was the internet created to survive a nuclear strike?", but the web page's current title is "Was the internet designed to survive a nuclear attack?" Cars were designed to hold drink cups. They weren't created to hold drink cups, but at this point in the history of the development of cars, they do hold drink cups by design.

austin-cheney 2y ago

Irrespective of nuclear war the design goal was always to create a network of redundant nodes across wide geographical dispersion. That solves two problems: 1. Increases network durability. 2. Allows uninterrupted participation by geographically separated parties. This is a hallmark of military technology still very much in use today and it goes as far back as the mid-1860s when the new US Army Signal Corps began experimenting with and integrating into conflict locations the first electronic communication technologies. Geographically dispersed redundancies are still import to military communications. On a tactical level this typically involves things like radio relays on hilltops, tropospheric shots, and various line of sight technologies. On the strategic level it involves having multiple routes through the internet over different kinds of physical media moving in different geographic directions. You don't see this as much in the commercial world, because sending network traffic through less efficient routes is slow and costly, so redundancies are only an emergency fallback. From a military perspective the network will go down at any moment, so slow and expensive are still favorable to disconnection. As a result the military will eagerly employ many layers of many redundant options. Cost is a less significant factor for the military since they are the only ones to own all layers of their own stack and thus able to operate in isolation.

juliandicarlo11 2y ago

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Merrill 2y ago

The benefits of a research project as described to the funding authority and the benefits of a research project after it is done are often not the same.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Was the internet designed to survive a nuclear attack? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33402256 - Oct 2022 (115 comments) HN: Was the internet designed to resist nuclear attacks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415376 - July 2019 (3 comments)

limit499karma 2y ago

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cadence- 2y ago

The original creators of the early version of the Internet wanted it to be open and equal, making sure one entity couldn't control it. The fact that this design also would be helpful after a nuclear attack was used to get the required funding from the US military.

jcrawfordor 2y ago

I'm an enthusiast and writer on the history of military communications technology, particularly during the Cold War. The internet is very much part of this story, and I am asked about this controversy from time to time. The problem is, I find that people who argue for both positions are becoming much too fixated on the idea that there was some single set of influences on a complex project. There isn't really any answer to "was the internet designed to withstand nuclear war" for the same reason that there isn't really any single answer to any question about the historical motivations of complex undertakings. That's just not how history works. There are some facts which we know to be true: 1) Various components of the defense complex were actively researching survivable C2 communications, particularly beginning in the 1950s although there were earlier precedents. Many of these efforts involved ideas that were similar to those used in modern computer networking, and they sometimes culminated in built systems with meaningful similarities to the internet, like AUTODIN. 2) A diverse cast of academics, contractors, and government entities were involved in these projects. Sometimes the same people worked on multiple projects. Even when they didn't, there were often communications between these entities, but sometimes, due to security concerns, there wasn't. Much of this communication was informal, so in retrospect it is hard to tell who knew what. There can be surprises both directions. 3) Communications technologies often emerge naturally from innovations in other fields, technical advances, etc., so while many similar communications technologies have a shared intellectual heritage, it is also not that unusual for totally independent efforts to arrive at roughly the same point. Radio is a classic example. I think that, in consideration of these facts, we can reach two conclusions: A) It seems likely that some of the people involved in ARPANET were familiar with survivable C2 research and applied those ideas to their efforts. After all, lots of people and lots of organizations worked on these programs, and some of the research was widely distributed within the defense-industrial-academic complex during the '50s and '60s. B) It also seems likely that ARPANET independently arrived at similar endpoints. After all, it had some similar constraints and objectives, and its creators were working with mostly the same underlying technology. These two do not contradict each other. In fact, I think it is by far most likely that both are true in the cases of different individual people and different individual aspects of the design. That's just how these things are. Before considering The Internet specifically, let's consider a couple of similar situations in the development of technology: 1) People sometimes do a great deal of hand-wringing over the assignment of labels like "the first programmable computer." I have always been very wary of giving these sorts of titles without a fair number of weasel words. Consider, for example, the ENIAC, usually called the "first programmable computer." And yet, there is a compelling argument that a number of the substantial design elements of ENIAC, including its programmability, are derived from work done for an earlier codebreaking machine called Colossus. This connection remained unknown for many years because of the secrecy surrounding Colossus... a level of secrecy that means that, while a number of people who worked on Colossus and later worked on ENIAC almost certainly carried over ideas, they wouldn't have admitted to having done so as Colossus was officially unknown to the ENIAC project. The particular climate of wartime and military technological development means that ideas often move around in subtle ways, and knowledge of where an idea came from is intentionally obscured. The history of military technology can be a very difficult field for this reason. 2) Almost at the opposite ends of the spectrum, information often flows very freely in academic and industrial laboratory environments, and so ideas spread without clear documentation. I am reminded of a piece I wrote years ago, on the fact that several early internet protocols use a similar set of three-digit status codes in similar ways (HTTP, for example). Oddly enough, these pseudo-standard status codes appear almost simultaneously in RJE and FTP, but neither mentions the other. Over time I have been lucky enough to get in touch with several of the authors of both RFCs, and while none of them can recall the origin of the codes, they agree with my general theory: the two separate groups, both at MIT, had just shared notes during the development of the protocols and one of them informally adopted the status code scheme from the other. People talk to each other, and ideas often move between projects without formal documentation. So, with those two examples of subtle cross-project influence in mind, can we say anything suggestive about ARPANET? Well, there are certain suggestive details. For example, by the time ARPANET's first IMPs were built, at least one researcher (Howard Frank) was engaged in ARPANET research who had previously consulted on survivable C2 networks. But the ARPANET project had already set certain design details like packet-switching by that point... which raises the question of if packet-switching is even the important part. Howard Frank wasn't working on packet switching itself, he was working on performance and reliability modeling of topologies for packet switching, an area where military C2 research was probably generally ahead of ARPANET research at that time. So, if we take the face-value assumption that aspects of ARPANET topology research were probably based on survivable C2 research, does that mean that ARPANET was "created to survive a nuclear strike?" Or did it merely end up that way? It ends up coming down to splitting hairs about what "created" means, an exercise that sort of ignores the fact that technological developments always combine established ideas and new ones. ARPANET was not built for military C2. It was used for military C2 later on, but during the early days of ARPANET the military had more wide-area networking initiatives than you could shake a stick at and ARPANET was not one of the ones contracted for C2 purposes. Was ARPANET designed for nuclear survivability? The most obvious answer is "no," because the early topology of ARPANET lacked the level of redundancy in its topology that actual survivable networks of the era had. But, this seems to have been more a consequence of funding and resource availability than intentions, because ARPANET researchers had done plenty of work on performance and reliability, using basically the same methods as used for survivable networks. So maybe, at the end of the day, the "best" answer to this is sort of a boring one: meh. Nuclear survivability was obviously not a goal of ARPANET because ARPANET did not build out a survivable network. That said, ARPANET incorporated most of the technical ideas from survivable networks of the era. It is a virtual certainty that ARPANET got some of those ideas from earlier and simultaneous research into survivable networks, but it is also a virtual certainty that ARPANET arrived at some of them independently. If you consider "packet switching" to be the main technical advancement of ARPANET, it's probably not an idea that ARPANET got from survivable C2 research, because the historical record looks pretty confident that multiple people independently arrived at packet switching. That ought not to be surprising to anyone, because packet switching is a fairly direct evolution of practices established in radio and telegraph networks almost fifty years before. But, I also think it's an unnecessarily restrictive view of ARPANET's technical contributions, and other aspects of ARPANET like routing policy were definitely influenced by survivable communications research and, to some extent, directly based on survivability work. What all this means about why ARPANET was "created" or what it was "designed" for is strictly a matter of how you interpret those words. Yes, articles and books and etc. should not repeat the claim that "the Internet was created to survive a nuclear strike," because the truth and falsity of that statement requires a lengthy and nuanced explanation. When we express history as simple facts we should try to stick to the ones that are, like, 90% true, instead of like 50% true. But "facts" about history are rarely 100% true, we're just not that lucky. It all happened a long time ago, there were a lot of people involved, different people were doing different things, it's a tangled mess of motivations and influences. That's why we study it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Postscript: Also, packet-switching is not at all intrinsic to survivable networks, although certainly survivability lead to a lot of advancements in packet-switching. But there were also a lot of circuit-switched survivable networks, and for a good span of the Cold War, I would say that circuit-switching outnumbered packet-switching for hardened C2. You'll notice that AT&T, the military's #1 choice for hardened communications, was firmly not on the packet switching side of things. But the military also contracted C2 projects to Western Union, who were basically arriving at modern packet switching by their own route (automated telegraph routing). This schism, between packet-switching and circuit-switching, remains a critical part of the data communications story today.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

I found this article difficult to read and confusing. In the title "... a nuclear strike". In the article: "... not kept in bunkers.. but on regular computers". Well is the idea to survive nuclear armageddon, or to survive a strike? A strike can take out a city if that happens the network continues to function - whatever nodes were just lost. Having everything inside a hardened bunker is not required. In so far as nuclear armageddon, I am not sure that having computers inside bunkers would help keep the internet up given it requires wiring or wireless infrastructure to communicate. If Having computer systems still operate, even on their own, then a bunker starts naking sense.

runlevel1 2y ago
> A strike can take out a city if that happens the network continues to function - whatever nodes were just lost. That's true up to a limit. Regional consolidation of ISPs have led to centralization. For instance, the 2020 Nashville AT&T building bombing caused a fairly widespread outage of phone and internet spread across 5 states. It took quite a lot of work to restore service despite most of the switching equipment not being damaged. Take out a few critical interconnection/peering points and you could have something of an internet Kessler Syndrome as a thundering herd of traffic was routed over overlapping, lower-preference routes. It would take a great deal of work by a relatively small group of people to stabilize. Work made more difficult from problems communicating, and many of the network engineers are not going to be local to the equipment they manage. Not to mention how something like that would surface all kinds of previously unforeseen bidirectional dependencies.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

Norway was the first nation outside of the US to get connected to the Arpanet¹³³. This was done to have for the US military to have "real-time" access to seismic data from sensors in Norway, that would detect nuclear activity of various forms. Primarily those in the Soviet Union. I can at least say ARPANET was expanded to Norway for military purposes. A family member of mine was the first foreigner to "chat" with folks in the US via ARPANET. And later given access to compute resources in the US, for work that was a bit hush hush. ¹ https://www.nb.no/en/story/da-norge-fikk-internett/#:~:text=As%20the%20second%20country%20in,and%20researchers%20in%20the%20US https://www.nb.no/en/story/da-norge-fikk-internett/#:~:text=.... ² https://www.norsar.no/about-us/history/arpanet https://www.norsar.no/about-us/history/arpanet ³ https://www.ffi.no/en/news/from-the-us-to-ffi-kjeller-was-first-online https://www.ffi.no/en/news/from-the-us-to-ffi-kjeller-was-fi...

aaron695 2y ago

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openrisk 2y ago

The more important modern question: was it designed to survive a software update?

pronoiac 2y ago

> I was unable to find a way to reach Ed Krol or Bruce Sterling ... Bruce Sterling was on Twitter when this was written, and I follow him on Mastodon now. I'll contact him there.

musha68k 2y ago

Weirdly self assured article? Still good someone is talking about history but let's not forget that securing the budget for all of this came out of the literal war chest of the US. Not an Elon fan but FWIW and AFAIK Starlink's usage during the current war in Ukraine is the fully realized DARPA plan of the last private (?) company in a long line providing internet infrastructure since ~ about 1983 when both TCP/IP and Reagan's general privatization efforts slowly started to "take over" and extend the academic internet. All for the purpose of warfare, everything else was extra. Including keeping Licklider and generations of hippies happy / happily designing and building / maintaining the early waves until businesses could take "the formulas" and go from there. Vint Cerf: > The earliest demonstration of the triple network Internet was in July 1977. We had several people involved. In order to link a mobile packet radio in the Bay Area, Jim Mathis was driving a van on the San Francisco Bayshore Freeway with a packet radio system running on an LSI-11. This was connected to a gateway developed by .i.Internet: history of: Strazisar, Virginia; Virginia Strazisar at BBN. Ginny was monitoring the gateway and had artificially adjusted the routing in the system. It went over the Atlantic via a point-to-point satellite link to Norway and down to London, by land line, and then back through the Atlantic Packet Satellite network (SATNET) through a Single Channel Per Carrier (SCPC) system, which had ground stations in Etam, West Virginia, Goonhilly Downs England, and Tanum, Sweden. The German and Italian sites of SATNET hadn't been hooked in yet. Ginny was responsible for gateways from packet radio to ARPANET, and from ARPANET to SATNET. Traffic passed from the mobile unit on the Packet Radio network across the ARPANET over an internal point-to-point satellite link to University College London, and then back through the SATNET into the ARPANET again, and then across the ARPANET to the USC Information Sciences Institute to one of their DEC KA-10 (ISIC) machines. > So what we were simulating was someone in a mobile battlefield environment going across a continental network, then across an intercontinental satellite network, and then back into a wireline network to a major computing resource in national headquarters. Since the Defense Department was paying for this, we were looking for demonstrations that would translate to militarily interesting scenarios. So the packets were traveling 94,000 miles round trip, as opposed to what would have been an 800-mile round trip directly on the ARPANET. We didn't lose a bit! https://netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html https://netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html