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

[Alex McKenzie]

 Miles,

I believe the emphasis on survivability came from Frank Heart.  Building
the early ARPAnet was a very risky project, in the sense that there was a
tight deadline, it would be easy to see if it worked or not, and most
people didn't believe it would work.  Frank's reputation was very much on
the line.  The ruggedized IMP cabinet was part of his emphasis on
controlling everything the team could control, to minimize risk.  But the
particular risks the ruggedized cabinet was intended to protect against
were:
- careless site personnel, who cared about their own computers but might be
expected to stick the IMP in a storage closet where maintenance workers
would bump it, and
- graduate students who might be inclined to study it, perhaps with
destructive results. (Lest this seem outlandish, the TIP in Hawaii was a
sore spot of unreliability  when I was running the NCC - turned out a
graduate student was crashing it every day by taping into its power supply
which was just right for his project.  The TIP was NOT in a ruggedized box.)
The group was not trying to protect against EMP.

More generally, if the ARPAnet had been designed to survive a nuclear
attack it would have been necessary to insure that the IMP-to_IMP circuits
did not go through the small number of Telco offices which made up the
Telco backbone.  No effort was made to influence the provisioning of these
circuits, and it can be presumed that loss of only a few major cities would
have resulted in most of the leased lines disappearing.

Cheers,
Alex

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 10:48 AM Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
wrote:

> Bernie,
>
> On 2/14/19 9:28 AM, Bernie Cosell wrote:
>
> On February 14, 2019 09:13:42 Alejandro Acosta
> <alejandroacostaalamo at gmail.com> <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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