InfoHatter.com

by Brian Vuyk, student at Redeemer University College

Introduction

According to Statistics Canada, as of 2003, 63% of Canadian households were connected to the Internet.1 The Internet has played an increasing role in the life of almost every person, regardless of where they may live. Because of the Internet, it is now possible to easily find information of any sort. The collaboration made possible by the Internet has led to major increases in medical sciences. Inf fact, through modern technologies such as the United Devices Cancer Research Project2 or the Folding@Home Project3, anyone connected to the Internet can contribute towards scientific discovery.

Paul Baran’s ideas had a very large impact on the Internet today. If it was not for his formative ideas concerning redundancy and packet switching, it is quite possible that the Internet as we know it would not exist. However, he is relatively unknown, without the fame of Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, or Vincent Cerf, who wrote the TCP/IP protocol. As one of the pioneers of network technology, he deserves a more hallowed place among the histories of Computer Science.

A Brief History of the Internet

The Internet dates back to the beginnings of the Cold War. In 1957, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics has launched the Sputnik satellite. This set off fears in the United States about a possible technological and scientific gap between the two nations. In response to this, before the end of the year, the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in order to establish an American lead in science and technology. One of the earliest concerns of the DoD was the issue of communications in the event of a nuclear war. The telephone system of the time consisted primarily of switching offices, each connected to thousands of telephones. Each of these switching offices were in turn connected to a larger called toll offices. Each toll office was in turn connected to one or two other toll offices, with little redundancy. Their concern was the the destruction of a few central offices in the event of a nuclear war would fragment the telephone system into many small islands of communication.4

Near the beginning of 1960, the United States Air Force commissioned Paul Baran of RAND Corporation to study the possibility of creating a decentralized network which could survive a nuclear attack, while allowing the United States to retain command and control of communications to it’s Army, Air Force and Navy in order to launch a counter attack. The United States saw a survivable communications framework as a necessity in the case of a nuclear attack, in order that proper command and control might be maintained.5

Baran, by this point, had already independently done some research into the field of “survivable communications”. As an ethical issue, he felt that if a communications system could created which could survive a nuclear strike, the temptation to launch a preemptive strike would be much reduced for military leaders.6