[ih] ruggedized Honeywell 516 ARPANET IMP cabinet top lifting hooks (Was: The IMP Lights story (Was: Nit-picking an origin story))

[Karl Auerbach]

When I started over at SDC (1972?) we were working with ARPAnet 
concepts, but in an context more of actual deployment and use of the 
then developing ARPAnet technology.  And we were doing this under 
contract to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.  So one of our primary goals 
was nuclear survivability of the net (if not of individual devices).

Dave Kaufman and I pretty much always spoke of a unique, but 
anticipated, class of packet switching device failure: vaporization in a 
nuclear blast.

I had previously been working on a satellite project that had very 
distinct resemblances to the later "War Games" and earlier "Dr. 
Strangelove" films - we even had those big war rooms with wall displays 
seen in movies, but ours were real - so I was already well marinated in 
nuclear warfare by the time I got involved in network security research 
at SDC.

(Because nearly everything we did was under the US [and sometimes UK] 
security classification system we were essentially a technology black hole.)

So, at least within the world of military research and development, we 
did look at IMPs and packet switching technology in terms of nuclear 
robustness (and also of capture of working, physical devices by an 
enemy, etc.)

         --karl--

On 8/25/25 6:03 AM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 8/25/2025 6:00 AM, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> There was no requirement or expectation that the IMPs would survive a
>> nuclear event.  The idea that the net was designed for nuclear
>> survivability is a red herring.
>
>
> In later years, I either heard Larry Roberts directly, or someone tell 
> me he said, when questioned about the claim of nuclear robustness that 
> if that had been a goal, sites would have had at least /three/ links, 
> not two...
>
> d/
>