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

[Bernie Cosell]

On February 14, 2019 10:32:16 Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> 
wrote:
> On 2/14/19 9:28 AM, Bernie Cosell wrote:
>> 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.
we couldn't do anything, of course, about continuity of operations, per se,
but we certainly focused on having the IMP be as resilient {including such
hacks as rebooting froma neighbor, rather than someone feeding paper tape
in} .   Will Crowther, in particular, wanted the network to work.   if 
there was
a way {looking from a god's eye view of the topology of the net} to get from
A to B, regardless of outages and such, we wanted an isolated IMP, without 
benefit
of knowing the topology of the net or a central oracle telling it how to 
get where,
to figure out if a rute was possible  and then make an "educated guess" which
of its modem lines would get the packet there most efficiently.


of course we saw instances of "rerouting" around problems early on. , but the
two things  i thought were cool was when/if the net got partitioned, the 
two {or
more} sections just kept going and then quietly stitched itself back 
together when
the necessary links were restored, and when a new IMP came online nothing
had to be done.  you just turned it on and it, without further ado, it said 
hello
to its neighbors and became part of the mix.


i think we didn't fully appreciate at the time nust how resilient the damn
things were and how that shaped the perception of it.   very quickly, scarily
so if you knew about the insides of the IMP 😊, the network became almost
a utility.  Len at UCLA and folks at BBN discovered that the idea of the 
ARPAnet
as being a networking experiment got hamstrung.  it had kinda showed
that the network level questions had been answered - routing worked, the
network was resilient, rhe queuing theory worked, heterogeneity worked.
of course none of it was perfect, but it worked. and that almost immediately
changed the "conversation"..  there was now a working network and while the
squirrels kept spinning the exercise wheel to improve the infrastructure
the focus shifted to question of whar to do with the damn thing.
> 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?
i was told the the original 516s were fully ruggedized and tempest secure.
dunno about EMP.  i was just amused by this big, solid monster.. it seemed
overkill.  but at least one thing that accomplished was to keep curious
pokers at the sites from messing with it. i reall don't think "war survival"
of the system was much of a consideration.  perhaps dave remembers
how they decided on the full-military cabinet.  i joined the project after 
it was
a fait accompli.

/b\



                     Bernie Cosell
           bernie at fantasyfarm. com
— Too many people,  too few sheep —
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