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

[Vint Cerf]

Alex is essentially correct. Paul Baran's work WAS aimed at post-nuclear
survival but he never got to try his ideas out as they
were rejected as unimplementable or uninteresting by a circuit-switching
oriented Defense Communications Agency.

Larry Roberts was clear that the ARPANET was intended to support resource
sharing.

By the time Bob Kahn and I started working on Internet with its focus on
command/control, the issue of survivability
was back on the table.  The multi-network design contemplated multiple
networks operated by distinct entities
(in the DoD perspective it was multiple countries or aggregates like NATO)
and resilience was important. I went
so far as to commission a test in which we flew packet radios in Strategic
Air Command aircraft, artificially "broke"
the ARPANET up into fragments and re-integrated them through ground to air
packet radio connectivity. I was
particularly worried about the partitioning of a constituent network which
would cause great confusion for  the
routing algorithm (a source gateway might know know to which "half" of the
fragmented network a packet should
be sent. My hazy recollection is that Radia Perlman came up with a way to
solve that problem that involved
creating new autonomous systems out of each "piece" and re-enabling routing
algorithms.

vint


On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 12:18 PM Alex McKenzie <aamsendonly396 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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