begin quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED] as of Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 08:58:00PM -0700:
[snip]
> The 'Net was designed to survive a nuclear attack.
Was it?
from "where wizards stay up late: the origins of the internet"
by katie hafner and matthew lyon
"Bob Tayler, the director of a corporate research facility
in Silicon Valley, had come to the party [BBN reunion of
ARPANET pioneers] 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."
"Tayler 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 the ARPANET. The projecthad embodied the most
peaceful intentions--to link computers at scientific
laboratories across the country so that researchers might
share computer resources. Taylor knew the ARPANET and its
progency, 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; Tayler was beginning
to feel like a crank."
-- from the prologue
But that's the ARPANET. Packet-switching networks....
"In the early 1960s, before Larry Roberts had even set to
work creating a new computer network, two other researchers,
Paul Baran and Donald Davies--completely unknown to each
other and working continents apart toward different goals--
arrived at virtually the same revolutionary idea for a new
kind of communications network. The realization of their
concepts came to be known as packet-switching."
So a counter-point:
"Soon after Baran had arrived at RAND, he developed an
interest in the survivability of communications systems
under nuclear attack...."
And a counter-counter-point:
"...The motivation that led Davies to conceive of a packet-
switching network had nothing to do with military concerns
that had driven Baran. Davies simply wanted to exploit the
technical strengths he saw in digital computers and switches,
to bring about a highly responsive, highly interactive
computing over long distances. Such a network would have
greater speed and efficiency than existing systems. Davies
was concerned that circuit-switched networks were poorly
matched to the requirements of interacting computers. The
irregular, bursty characteristics of computer-generated data
traffic did not fit well with the uniform channel capacity
of the telephone system. Matching the network design to the
new types of data traffic became his main motivation."
And finally, to up everyone's salt intake, a wikipedia reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Origins_of_the_ARPANET
--
_ |\_
\|
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
