[ih] When the words Internet was design to survive a nuclear war appeared for the first time?

[Miles Fidelman]

Bernie,

On 2/14/19 9:28 AM, Bernie Cosell wrote:

> On February 14, 2019 09:13:42 Alejandro Acosta 
> <alejandroacostaalamo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>   Today I was reading some news about Internet and in one of them I
>> found the phrase (that all of you have listened before):  "Internet
>> (ARPANET) was intended to survive a nuclear war", however, as far as I
>> know, this is kind of a myth, right?, ARPANET was intended as a research
>> network and the "war" part if very far away from the thuth.
>
> my take on that is that there were two lines of thought leading up to the
> ARPAnet.  very very roughly: one was paul baran's, who was thinking
> about how the military command and control might be able to continue 
> functioning in the event of an attack, and JCR Licklider, who was thinking
> about how wide-spread researchers could share resources, ideas and 
> results
> to better collaborate.
>
> when the ARPAnet got funded by the DoD, Baran's story was the easier to
> understand to the average person, raather than the more diaphanous idea
> of researcher collaboration.  so Baran's take kinda caught the public
> imagination, but the reality for those of us working on it was the it was
> {somehow  :o)} to be a research tool.
>
You were involved a lot earlier than I was.  Perhaps you could comment 
on how much folks thought about fault-tolerance in the early days.  It's 
always struck me that things like continuity-of-operations, in the face 
of node & link outages, and no-single-point-of-failure, were baked in 
from the beginning. You know - all the stuff that would allow the net to 
survive everything from backhoes to natural disasters, and 
coincidentally, nuclear war.

On the physical side, the early IMPs were pretty rugged boxes (not so 
much C/30s and such).  Were any of the IMPs built to withstand EMP?

Miles



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

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