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Perhaps corroborating your point, excerpted from Waldrop's 'The Dream Machine': "Why did ARPA build the network?” Lukasik asks. “There were actually two reason

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.

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.