[ih] ARPAnet and nuclear survivability

Vint Cerf vint at google.com
Tue Sep 1 13:27:08 PDT 2009


larry roberts confirms that the purpose of arpanet was resource sharing.

the nuclear resilience story came from Paul Baran's work (earlier).

When I managed the Internet project at DARPA, however, I did want
to show resilience so we demonstrated this putting packet radios
in strategic air command aircraft, artificially breaking up the ARPANET
and gluing the pieces together using ground and air packet radios and
TCP/IP.

vint


On Sep 1, 2009, at 3:59 PM, Bernie Cosell wrote:

> On another list the old question came up again and I'm not sure I've  
> ever
> gotten a straight answer.  I have always thought that Licklider's  
> intent
> was to build a collaboration/research network.   The early  
> participants
> were pretty much all universities and I can't recall any military  
> people
> involved in the design or development of it.  [OTOH the IMP *was*
> originally delivered in a fully mil-spec ruggedized case...]
>
> Others have repeated the claim that the justification for the  
> ARPAnet was
> to provide communications that could survive a nuclear attack and of
> course, there was Baran's paper [although he wasn't the only person
> developing ideas about packet switching]
>
> BUT as far as i can remember there were *NO* military folks involved  
> with
> anything to do with the early ARPAnet: I don't recall any military  
> info
> in the reports [at least not the ones that we [BBN] prepared], nor  
> did I
> remember any "requirements" that came from or were reviewed by  
> military
> folk.  Does anyone know that bit of the tale?  [e.g., I have no idea  
> how
> the ARPAnet was presented to Congress]
>
>  /Bernie\
>
> -- 
> Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
> mailto:bernie at fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
>    -->  Too many people, too few sheep  <--
>
>
>




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