On Internet Origins
Before the Internet connected billions of people, it had to solve one terrifying Cold War problem: how do you build a communication network that could survive a nuclear attack?
During the Cold War, the United States relied on long-distance military communication with switching centers spread across the country. The primary issue with this system is its centralized nature. If a major switching center was destroyed by an enemy attack it will cause a major disruption on the whole communication network.
Surviving the Nukes
Paul Baran recognized the problem and created and proposed a model for survival communication. In early 1960s Paul Baran published his paper "On Distributed Communications Networks" He presented two important concepts that is fundamental to how the modern Internet functions:
- Distributed Communications
- Message Blocks
Lets compare the telephone network during the cold war vs using the concepts Paul Baran introduced. If person A made a call to person B, the network will establish a continuous path between them, if the switching center fails along the path, the call could be disrupted. Instead of reserving one fixed path, the message is broken into many smaller pieces called packets, which travels the network through different routes. This is why the packet switching was a powerful idea, the information can keep flowing through whatever routes were available.
ARPANET, one of the Internet's foundational predecessors, used these concepts.