10 ms·

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

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
  The first time I heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network
user3939382 2y ago
Packet switching was invented by an American and Brit independently IIRC.
- mrighele 2y ago
  Yes, the linked article talks also about Donald Davies, which influenced more directly Arpanet. But the point about Paul Baran is that for him packed switching was a way to make communications more resilient in face of nuclear bombing (and other things) and he had at least some influence on the birth of the Internet, so if you ask me "what is the relation between the Internet and a nuclear strike" my first answer is "Paul Baran"
  - throw0101a 2y ago
    > But the point about Paul Baran is that for him packed switching was a way to make communications more resilient in face of nuclear bombing (and other things) and he had at least some influence on the birth of the Internet […] From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient... Baran's influence was perhaps in theory and algorithms, not in intent/use.
- dboreham 2y ago
  For a couple of decades there was a totally independent network stack in the UK (JANET) with its own equivalent of RFCs and so on. History gets written by the victors.
KineticLensman 2y ago
> but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike There is a lot more to the design of 'the internet' than the selection of a packet switched protocol. The early boxes were not hardened in any way and were intended to support computer timesharing amongst academic researchers. The DoD's C2 providers themselves rejected the concept of a decentralised packet-switched network because 'it would never work'. Which is why the relevant theoretical papers were sitting on the shelf and available when ARPANET was designed
throw0101a 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). That cannot be said unless you can cite sources saying so. It's been a little while since I read Wizards, but I don't remember any mention of nuclear war until Baran's work at RAND is mentioned, which is a couple of chapters in (IIRC). For Licklider et al it was all about research, collaboration, and resource sharing. > 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. Baran's work was used in things like queuing theory, but work was already underway on ARPAnet before Baran (and Davis in the UK) was roped in. In fact it was Davis that pointed out Baran's work to the ARPAnet folks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies This is all covered in Where Wizards Say Up Late.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  1) Robustness in the face of nuclear disaster was one of the drivers of packet switching. 2) Not the only one, though. 3) It was such a good idea that it grew a life of its own, and no one talked about nuclear war anymore.
  - throw0101a 2y ago
    1) Only perhaps for Baran. Didn't enter into the equation for, e.g., Davies in the UK. From the Prologue of Wizards: > Bob Taylor, the director of a corporate research facility in Silicon Valley, had come to the party for old times sake, but he was also on a personal mission to correct an inaccuracy of long standing. Rumors had persisted for years that the ARPANET had been built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear attack. It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long enough to become widely accepted as fact. > Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge. > Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. When Time magazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... I would think that Taylor of all people who know: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient... From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient...
dboreham 2y ago
I've noticed that the closer I am to historical events, the more wrong reporting of those events tends to be. I have a neighbor who worked at RAND in the 60s and will ask him about this next time we meet. Worth noting perhaps that many (all?) technical innovations are the result of some underlying technology maturing to the point that it can be applied to a problem. In this case, I bet that nobody liked the fragility and brittleness of circuit switched networking, but in order to make a packet switched network you need small fast computers that are cheap enough to deploy as network nodes. These appeared : minicomputers. The first ARPANet nodes were minicomputers running routing software. In fact the Internet used regular computers as routers into near modern history (IBM RISC machines iirc were deployed at the DS3 upgrade). So PSN is the result of a) people sitting around wishing they could have a PSN, and b) the technology to actually realize that becoming practical. There's no eureka moment.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
  > I've noticed that the closer I am to historical events, the more wrong reporting of those events tends to be. That is not just for historical events, but for anything you are familiar with. Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
- marcus0x62 2y ago
  > IBM RISC machines iirc were deployed at the DS3 upgrade You recall correctly. Info/pictures here[0]. 0 - https://www.rcsri.org/collection/nsfnet-t3/ https://www.rcsri.org/collection/nsfnet-t3/
  - sillywalk 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the link. Do you know anything more about the router cards? It says they had intel i960s that ran AIX, but I wonder if it was just the RS/6000 that ran AIX, and the boards ran some custom firmware.
    - 2y ago
dredmorbius 2y ago
For those who are interested in that sort of thing, Baran's full 11 publications outlining the design goals and principles of packet-switched networks in January of 1964 are available from RAND as downloadable PDFs: <https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html> The first document introduces the basic problem: Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack. As a criterion of survivability we elect to use the percentage of stations both surviving the physical attack and remaining in electrical connection with the largest single group of surviving stations. This criterion is chosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the surviving stations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack. This means that small groups of stations isolated from the single largest group are considered to be ineffective. <https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html> "Attack" isn't defined, but it's clear that resilience against broad assaults was a key consideration from the very beginning.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > "Attack" isn't defined, but it's clear that resilience against broad assaults was a key consideration from the very beginning. It was a consideration for Baran's work, but not for ARPAnet: From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient...
soheil 2y ago
a nuclear attack could be natural selection for the internets evolution honestly.
phaedrus 2y ago
In my opinion packet switching is an idea that would have been inevitable once the technology to support it is in place. The real important idea of the Internet is the insight that the envelope should be independent of the data it contains. I say this because I work with specialized equipment that uses RS-232 serial protocols for communication, and despite many decades of examples available of "the right" way to do it (e.g. OSI model), engineers continue(d) to not understand this lesson and design ad hoc protocols that don't respect this division of concerns and which suffer for it. Even in IP protocols designed to modernize this to wrap the RS-232 serial packets in internet packets, they repeat the same mistake(s). That is, in the midst of having to deal with a more complicated problem for serial protocol to IP protocol conversion because the original format didn't clearly distinguish envelope from data, they compound the problem by mixing levels in the new protocol. For example, writing IPv4 into the standard for a proprietary an Application or Session level protocol even at the same time as our network is banning IPv4 and requiring IPv6, but the protocol is not even defined for IPv6 addresses. When it should be agnostic to IP level concerns entirely. (The engineers said, while designing the system, "well .1 is going to be this piece of equipment, .2 is going to be the other side, if it's blah blah blah it's .3, etc.")
- treyd 2y ago
  People keep repeating this mistake at all layers of the stack because they fail to see different layers as managing different sets of concerns and want to treat it as a monolith. A very recent and high level example of this is how the Matrix protocol was architected. By defining all the message formats in terms of JSON-over-HTTP it makes it difficult to only use part of the protocol and not all of it, and makes it difficult to use it over alternative transports since the assumptions of HTTP idioms are baked all the way down.
  - Arathorn 2y ago
    This is not true. For instance, https://matrix.org/blog/2021/06/10/low-bandwidth-matrix-an-implementation-guide/ https://matrix.org/blog/2021/06/10/low-bandwidth-matrix-an-i... shows how you can (very easily) swap http+json for coap+cbor as an alt transport for Matrix.
pjmorris 2y ago
Perhaps corroborating your point, excerpted from Waldrop's 'The Dream Machine': "Why did ARPA build the network?” Lukasik asks. “There were actually two reasons. One was that the network would be good for computer science."" ... "But there was also another side to the story, which was that ARPA was a Defense Department agency. And after Eb [Rechtin] came in, defense relevance became the dominant notion. Everybody was writing relevance statements. " ... "So in that environment, I would have been hard pressed to plow a lot of money into the network just to improve the productivity of the researchers. The rationale just wouldn’t have been strong enough. What was strong enough was this idea that packet switching would be more survivable, more robust under damage to the network. If a plane got shot down, or an artillery barrage hit the command center, the messages would still get through. And in a strategic situation—meaning a nuclear attack—the president could still communicate to the missile fields. So I can assure you, to the extent that I was signing the checks, which I was from nineteen sixty-seven on, I was signing them because that was the need I was convinced of.” Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine (p. 273). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Yes, quite. This is a very silly article which ignores a lot of the real history in favour of a cutesy top up of early 1990s nostalgia - which was a good 20-30 years after the events that really matter. Saying "The Internet isn't ARPANET" is ridiculous. Of course it isn't. ARPANET was an academic research project with a mix of defence and open R&D requirements. The Internet is a collection of extra layers of commercial development on top of some of that R&D. Academic research projects are rarely hardened because the point of the project is to investigate possibilities, not to spend hundreds of billions building a physically bomb-proof network that's useless because the core tech doesn't work. When the Berlin Wall came down the goals changed, but the core concept of distributed scalable robustness is still very much there today. Of course now we have too many choke points, so it's not as robust as it could be. But if someone cuts a cable packets will still find a longer, slower way around as long as the bandwidth is there.
  - Yeul 2y ago
    In the case of all out nuclear war with the USSR the choke points would be the 3000 or so targets that would be hit by Soviet nukes.
cfmcdonald 2y ago
> but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike On what basis? What is the distinction between being "created" to survive a nuclear strike, and being "designed" to do so? > that was one of the reason that packet switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at the time, circuit switching). Yes, but I don't think it's a relevant one. Baran's papers kinda-sorta-maybe had some influence on ARPANET, but ARPANET mostly got packet-switching (and certainly the term "packet") from Donald Davies. If you look at the actual layout of ARPANET it wasn't very survivable (not much redundancy in the links) [0], compared to Baran's proposal [1]. Internetworking and "the Internet" as we know it came much later and was way beyond the point where Baran had any influence. [0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ARPANET_maps https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ARPANET_maps [1]: https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/baran_nets_large.gif https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge...
teleforce 2y ago
For all intents and purposes the Internet was created by and for US military not for public utility, and one of the main reasons for its creation, if not the sole reason, is to be able to withstand large scale nuclear attack. It's not created for remote feeding the cats with the IoT at home while you are away. It's easily the top ten invention of 20th century. It's not only Internet, FFT also was created to detect illegal nuclear testing and it's included the top ten algorithms of 20th century [1],[2]. There's no shame of admitting the facts. If not for military purpose Internet will probably never ever see the light of day. The Internet packet switching end to end network precursor and predecessor in France proposed and implemented by Louis Pouzin, famously called the 4th man of the Internet, who coined the word "datagram" the very fundamental concept in packet switching, lost his proposal to other communication technology for France nation wide networks implementation [3]. The original inventors of the Internet proposed the idea to AT&T, the US communication behemoth and monopoly at the time laughed at the packet switching idea saying that it will not work and does not make any economic sense. The only reason Internet created and survived is because of the military applications and as any military application the main objective is to maintain and sustain command and control where Internet is more than capable of. I've once read someone simulated 99% infrastructure demolition (as in nuclear attack) and Internet communication managed to survive intact. Cannot recalled the article now, perhaps this is where ChatGPT becomes handy. The fact that the US military maintained a separate military network (similar to Internet) from the public Internet after the Internet gone public and its popularity increased, provided the hints why it's so important for the US military. [1] Great algorithms are the poetry of computation: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-355/misc/Top%20Ten%20Algorithms.html https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-355/misc/Top%20Ten%20Al... [2] The Algorithm That Almost Stopped The Development of Nuclear Weapons: https://www.iflscience.com/the-algorithm-that-almost-stopped-the-development-of-nuclear-weapons-67750 https://www.iflscience.com/the-algorithm-that-almost-stopped... [3]Louis Pouzin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > For all intents and purposes the Internet was created by and for US military not for public utility, and one of the main reasons for its creation, if not the sole reason, is to be able to withstand large scale nuclear attack. And yet Charles M. Herzfeld (who was ARPA director at the time) and Robert Taylor (who was in charge of getting ARPAnet going) say otherwise: it was to link computing centres across the country so that resources could be shared and collaboration would be easier. If Herzfeld and Taylor didn't know why ARPA created ARPAnet then who else would? The entire linked to article is about tracing the source of the "able to withstand large scale nuclear attack" original story myth: > However, the documentation is voluminous and the people who were in the room have all given a consistent story about how it was to build a network for time-sharing of expensive computers and better collaboration.
m463 2y ago
> The idea of packet switching as a way make a communication network more robust came to Paul Baran a few years earlier, I remember back in the days when the internet was first starting to happen, seeing comments about packet switching. The gist of what I recall was that there was lots of dark fiber, and folks like AT&T were trying to prevent it from being used and force slow/expensive packet switching on us, billing us per-packet or something. it is hard to dig up any article about this however.
- Rattled 2y ago
  When was this? I would have thought the internet was well established before fiber optic cabling was widely used.
walrus01 2y ago
I think it's also worth noting that the physical infrastructure of certain portions of the circuit-switched AT&T Long Lines network (which also carried the AUTOVON network for the DoD) were designed, or at least attempted to be designed, to survive a nuclear strike. Theoretically traffic would have been manually re-routed around destroyed areas in a post-strike scenario. There's certain underground bunker sites on the historical L4 transcontinental coaxial cable routes which were designed with equipment mounted on springs, massively thick concrete walls, decontamination showers, and so on. Other mountain top and flat land area microwave point to point relay sites were designed to take a certain amount of overpressure and possibly would have survived nearby smaller nuclear weapon strikes (though obviously not a direct hit). Much of this pre-dates 1969 and the concept of the ARPANET. If you dig into things like what telecom services/links supported the NIKE missile batteries built around major cities and so forth. And what telecom services/medium to long distance links supported the data feeds from regional radar sites into the SAGE direction centers. Here's a fairly typical example of the more costly site of site, which you can see the photos of under construction and how much extremely reinforced underground concrete is involved. https://coldwar-ct.com/Home_Page_S1DO.html https://coldwar-ct.com/Home_Page_S1DO.html

euroderf 2y ago

AUTODIN preceded it, but ARPANET won out over AUTODIN II.

PROMISE_237 2y ago
[dead]
esafak 2y ago
The first time I heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network

user3939382 2y ago

Packet switching was invented by an American and Brit independently IIRC.

mrighele 2y ago
Yes, the linked article talks also about Donald Davies, which influenced more directly Arpanet. But the point about Paul Baran is that for him packed switching was a way to make communications more resilient in face of nuclear bombing (and other things) and he had at least some influence on the birth of the Internet, so if you ask me "what is the relation between the Internet and a nuclear strike" my first answer is "Paul Baran"
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > But the point about Paul Baran is that for him packed switching was a way to make communications more resilient in face of nuclear bombing (and other things) and he had at least some influence on the birth of the Internet […] From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient... Baran's influence was perhaps in theory and algorithms, not in intent/use.
dboreham 2y ago
For a couple of decades there was a totally independent network stack in the UK (JANET) with its own equivalent of RFCs and so on. History gets written by the victors.

KineticLensman 2y ago

> but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike There is a lot more to the design of 'the internet' than the selection of a packet switched protocol. The early boxes were not hardened in any way and were intended to support computer timesharing amongst academic researchers. The DoD's C2 providers themselves rejected the concept of a decentralised packet-switched network because 'it would never work'. Which is why the relevant theoretical papers were sitting on the shelf and available when ARPANET was designed

throw0101a 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). That cannot be said unless you can cite sources saying so. It's been a little while since I read Wizards, but I don't remember any mention of nuclear war until Baran's work at RAND is mentioned, which is a couple of chapters in (IIRC). For Licklider et al it was all about research, collaboration, and resource sharing. > 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. Baran's work was used in things like queuing theory, but work was already underway on ARPAnet before Baran (and Davis in the UK) was roped in. In fact it was Davis that pointed out Baran's work to the ARPAnet folks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies This is all covered in Where Wizards Say Up Late.

AlbertCory 2y ago
1) Robustness in the face of nuclear disaster was one of the drivers of packet switching. 2) Not the only one, though. 3) It was such a good idea that it grew a life of its own, and no one talked about nuclear war anymore.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  1) Only perhaps for Baran. Didn't enter into the equation for, e.g., Davies in the UK. From the Prologue of Wizards: > Bob Taylor, the director of a corporate research facility in Silicon Valley, had come to the party for old times sake, but he was also on a personal mission to correct an inaccuracy of long standing. Rumors had persisted for years that the ARPANET had been built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear attack. It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long enough to become widely accepted as fact. > Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge. > Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. When Time magazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... I would think that Taylor of all people who know: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient... From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient...

dboreham 2y ago

I've noticed that the closer I am to historical events, the more wrong reporting of those events tends to be. I have a neighbor who worked at RAND in the 60s and will ask him about this next time we meet. Worth noting perhaps that many (all?) technical innovations are the result of some underlying technology maturing to the point that it can be applied to a problem. In this case, I bet that nobody liked the fragility and brittleness of circuit switched networking, but in order to make a packet switched network you need small fast computers that are cheap enough to deploy as network nodes. These appeared : minicomputers. The first ARPANet nodes were minicomputers running routing software. In fact the Internet used regular computers as routers into near modern history (IBM RISC machines iirc were deployed at the DS3 upgrade). So PSN is the result of a) people sitting around wishing they could have a PSN, and b) the technology to actually realize that becoming practical. There's no eureka moment.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
> I've noticed that the closer I am to historical events, the more wrong reporting of those events tends to be. That is not just for historical events, but for anything you are familiar with. Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
marcus0x62 2y ago
> IBM RISC machines iirc were deployed at the DS3 upgrade You recall correctly. Info/pictures here[0]. 0 - https://www.rcsri.org/collection/nsfnet-t3/ https://www.rcsri.org/collection/nsfnet-t3/
- sillywalk 2y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the link. Do you know anything more about the router cards? It says they had intel i960s that ran AIX, but I wonder if it was just the RS/6000 that ran AIX, and the boards ran some custom firmware.
  - 2y ago

dredmorbius 2y ago

For those who are interested in that sort of thing, Baran's full 11 publications outlining the design goals and principles of packet-switched networks in January of 1964 are available from RAND as downloadable PDFs: <https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html> The first document introduces the basic problem: Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack. As a criterion of survivability we elect to use the percentage of stations both surviving the physical attack and remaining in electrical connection with the largest single group of surviving stations. This criterion is chosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the surviving stations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack. This means that small groups of stations isolated from the single largest group are considered to be ineffective. <https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html> "Attack" isn't defined, but it's clear that resilience against broad assaults was a key consideration from the very beginning.

throw0101a 2y ago
> "Attack" isn't defined, but it's clear that resilience against broad assaults was a key consideration from the very beginning. It was a consideration for Baran's work, but not for ARPAnet: From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient...

soheil 2y ago

a nuclear attack could be natural selection for the internets evolution honestly.

phaedrus 2y ago

In my opinion packet switching is an idea that would have been inevitable once the technology to support it is in place. The real important idea of the Internet is the insight that the envelope should be independent of the data it contains. I say this because I work with specialized equipment that uses RS-232 serial protocols for communication, and despite many decades of examples available of "the right" way to do it (e.g. OSI model), engineers continue(d) to not understand this lesson and design ad hoc protocols that don't respect this division of concerns and which suffer for it. Even in IP protocols designed to modernize this to wrap the RS-232 serial packets in internet packets, they repeat the same mistake(s). That is, in the midst of having to deal with a more complicated problem for serial protocol to IP protocol conversion because the original format didn't clearly distinguish envelope from data, they compound the problem by mixing levels in the new protocol. For example, writing IPv4 into the standard for a proprietary an Application or Session level protocol even at the same time as our network is banning IPv4 and requiring IPv6, but the protocol is not even defined for IPv6 addresses. When it should be agnostic to IP level concerns entirely. (The engineers said, while designing the system, "well .1 is going to be this piece of equipment, .2 is going to be the other side, if it's blah blah blah it's .3, etc.")

treyd 2y ago
People keep repeating this mistake at all layers of the stack because they fail to see different layers as managing different sets of concerns and want to treat it as a monolith. A very recent and high level example of this is how the Matrix protocol was architected. By defining all the message formats in terms of JSON-over-HTTP it makes it difficult to only use part of the protocol and not all of it, and makes it difficult to use it over alternative transports since the assumptions of HTTP idioms are baked all the way down.
- Arathorn 2y ago
  This is not true. For instance, https://matrix.org/blog/2021/06/10/low-bandwidth-matrix-an-implementation-guide/ https://matrix.org/blog/2021/06/10/low-bandwidth-matrix-an-i... shows how you can (very easily) swap http+json for coap+cbor as an alt transport for Matrix.

pjmorris 2y ago

Perhaps corroborating your point, excerpted from Waldrop's 'The Dream Machine': "Why did ARPA build the network?” Lukasik asks. “There were actually two reasons. One was that the network would be good for computer science."" ... "But there was also another side to the story, which was that ARPA was a Defense Department agency. And after Eb [Rechtin] came in, defense relevance became the dominant notion. Everybody was writing relevance statements. " ... "So in that environment, I would have been hard pressed to plow a lot of money into the network just to improve the productivity of the researchers. The rationale just wouldn’t have been strong enough. What was strong enough was this idea that packet switching would be more survivable, more robust under damage to the network. If a plane got shot down, or an artillery barrage hit the command center, the messages would still get through. And in a strategic situation—meaning a nuclear attack—the president could still communicate to the missile fields. So I can assure you, to the extent that I was signing the checks, which I was from nineteen sixty-seven on, I was signing them because that was the need I was convinced of.” Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine (p. 273). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
Yes, quite. This is a very silly article which ignores a lot of the real history in favour of a cutesy top up of early 1990s nostalgia - which was a good 20-30 years after the events that really matter. Saying "The Internet isn't ARPANET" is ridiculous. Of course it isn't. ARPANET was an academic research project with a mix of defence and open R&D requirements. The Internet is a collection of extra layers of commercial development on top of some of that R&D. Academic research projects are rarely hardened because the point of the project is to investigate possibilities, not to spend hundreds of billions building a physically bomb-proof network that's useless because the core tech doesn't work. When the Berlin Wall came down the goals changed, but the core concept of distributed scalable robustness is still very much there today. Of course now we have too many choke points, so it's not as robust as it could be. But if someone cuts a cable packets will still find a longer, slower way around as long as the bandwidth is there.
- Yeul 2y ago
  In the case of all out nuclear war with the USSR the choke points would be the 3000 or so targets that would be hit by Soviet nukes.

cfmcdonald 2y ago

> but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike On what basis? What is the distinction between being "created" to survive a nuclear strike, and being "designed" to do so? > that was one of the reason that packet switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at the time, circuit switching). Yes, but I don't think it's a relevant one. Baran's papers kinda-sorta-maybe had some influence on ARPANET, but ARPANET mostly got packet-switching (and certainly the term "packet") from Donald Davies. If you look at the actual layout of ARPANET it wasn't very survivable (not much redundancy in the links) [0], compared to Baran's proposal [1]. Internetworking and "the Internet" as we know it came much later and was way beyond the point where Baran had any influence. [0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ARPANET_maps https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ARPANET_maps [1]: https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/baran_nets_large.gif https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge...

teleforce 2y ago

For all intents and purposes the Internet was created by and for US military not for public utility, and one of the main reasons for its creation, if not the sole reason, is to be able to withstand large scale nuclear attack. It's not created for remote feeding the cats with the IoT at home while you are away. It's easily the top ten invention of 20th century. It's not only Internet, FFT also was created to detect illegal nuclear testing and it's included the top ten algorithms of 20th century [1],[2]. There's no shame of admitting the facts. If not for military purpose Internet will probably never ever see the light of day. The Internet packet switching end to end network precursor and predecessor in France proposed and implemented by Louis Pouzin, famously called the 4th man of the Internet, who coined the word "datagram" the very fundamental concept in packet switching, lost his proposal to other communication technology for France nation wide networks implementation [3]. The original inventors of the Internet proposed the idea to AT&T, the US communication behemoth and monopoly at the time laughed at the packet switching idea saying that it will not work and does not make any economic sense. The only reason Internet created and survived is because of the military applications and as any military application the main objective is to maintain and sustain command and control where Internet is more than capable of. I've once read someone simulated 99% infrastructure demolition (as in nuclear attack) and Internet communication managed to survive intact. Cannot recalled the article now, perhaps this is where ChatGPT becomes handy. The fact that the US military maintained a separate military network (similar to Internet) from the public Internet after the Internet gone public and its popularity increased, provided the hints why it's so important for the US military. [1] Great algorithms are the poetry of computation: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-355/misc/Top%20Ten%20Algorithms.html https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-355/misc/Top%20Ten%20Al... [2] The Algorithm That Almost Stopped The Development of Nuclear Weapons: https://www.iflscience.com/the-algorithm-that-almost-stopped-the-development-of-nuclear-weapons-67750 https://www.iflscience.com/the-algorithm-that-almost-stopped... [3]Louis Pouzin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin

throw0101a 2y ago
> For all intents and purposes the Internet was created by and for US military not for public utility, and one of the main reasons for its creation, if not the sole reason, is to be able to withstand large scale nuclear attack. And yet Charles M. Herzfeld (who was ARPA director at the time) and Robert Taylor (who was in charge of getting ARPAnet going) say otherwise: it was to link computing centres across the country so that resources could be shared and collaboration would be easier. If Herzfeld and Taylor didn't know why ARPA created ARPAnet then who else would? The entire linked to article is about tracing the source of the "able to withstand large scale nuclear attack" original story myth: > However, the documentation is voluminous and the people who were in the room have all given a consistent story about how it was to build a network for time-sharing of expensive computers and better collaboration.

m463 2y ago

> The idea of packet switching as a way make a communication network more robust came to Paul Baran a few years earlier, I remember back in the days when the internet was first starting to happen, seeing comments about packet switching. The gist of what I recall was that there was lots of dark fiber, and folks like AT&T were trying to prevent it from being used and force slow/expensive packet switching on us, billing us per-packet or something. it is hard to dig up any article about this however.

Rattled 2y ago
When was this? I would have thought the internet was well established before fiber optic cabling was widely used.

walrus01 2y ago

I think it's also worth noting that the physical infrastructure of certain portions of the circuit-switched AT&T Long Lines network (which also carried the AUTOVON network for the DoD) were designed, or at least attempted to be designed, to survive a nuclear strike. Theoretically traffic would have been manually re-routed around destroyed areas in a post-strike scenario. There's certain underground bunker sites on the historical L4 transcontinental coaxial cable routes which were designed with equipment mounted on springs, massively thick concrete walls, decontamination showers, and so on. Other mountain top and flat land area microwave point to point relay sites were designed to take a certain amount of overpressure and possibly would have survived nearby smaller nuclear weapon strikes (though obviously not a direct hit). Much of this pre-dates 1969 and the concept of the ARPANET. If you dig into things like what telecom services/links supported the NIKE missile batteries built around major cities and so forth. And what telecom services/medium to long distance links supported the data feeds from regional radar sites into the SAGE direction centers. Here's a fairly typical example of the more costly site of site, which you can see the photos of under construction and how much extremely reinforced underground concrete is involved. https://coldwar-ct.com/Home_Page_S1DO.html https://coldwar-ct.com/Home_Page_S1DO.html