Re: <nettime> In an Internetworked World No One Is "Foreign"

[Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 03:04:02PM +0200, robert adrian wrote:
 
> Whenever you get a "free offer" there is usually a catch somehwere -
> so when DARPA donated TCP IP free to the world ....

The apple was never poisoned. The principals who invented packet
switching and prototyped it were all civilian, academic researchers.
The subsequent branching out of the technology into all nooks and
crannies of human endeavour is simply because it was so damn useful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

...

Misconceptions of design goals[edit]

Common ARPANET lore posits that the computer network was designed to
survive a nuclear attack. In A Brief History of the Internet, the
Internet Society describes the coalescing of the technical ideas that
produced the ARPANET:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that
the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to
nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated
RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later
work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability,
including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the
underlying networks.[12]

Although the ARPANET was designed to survive subordinate-network
losses, the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network
links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the
resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles
Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965â1967), said:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System
that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such
a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's
mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized
had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that
there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers
in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have
access to them, were geographically separated from them.[13]

Packet switching pioneer Paul Baran affirms this, explaining: "Bob
Taylor had a couple of computer terminals speaking to different
machines, and his idea was to have some way of having a terminal speak
to any of them and have a network. That's really the origin of the
ARPANET. The method used to connect things together was an open issue
for a time."[14]




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