How The Internet Got Started :: essays research papers

How The Internet Got StartedSome thirty years ago , the Rand corporation , Americas formost coldwar prize tank, faced a strange straegic problem. How could the US authrietiessuccesfully communicate after a nuclear war?Postnuclear America would need a comand-and-control network, linked from city to city , state to state, base to base . But no matter how throughly thatnetwork was armored or protected , its switches and wiring would always bevulnerable to the refer of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce anyconceivable network to tatters. And how would the network itself be commandedand controlled ? Any underlying authority, any network central citadel, would bean obvious and immediate target for man enemy missle. The center of the networkwould be the very first place to go.RAND mulled over this grim father in deep multitude secrecy, and arrivedat a daring solution made in 1964.The principles were simple . The networkitself would be assumed to be perfidious at all times . It would be designedfrom the get-go to tyranscend its all times . It would be designed from theget-go to transcend its own unrreliability. All the nodes from computers inthe network would be equal in status to all other nodes , each node with itsown authority to originate , pass , and recieve messages. The messages would bedual-lane into packets, each packet seperatly addressed. Each packet would beginat some undertake source node , and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individualbasis.In fall 1969, the first such node was insalled in UCLA. By December 1969,there were 4 nodes on the infant network, which was named arpanet, after itsPentagon sponsor.The four computers could even be programed remotely from the other nodes.thanks to ARPANET scientists and researchers could share bingle anothers computerfacilities by long -distance . This was a very handy service , for computer-time was precious in the early 70s. In 1971 ther were fifteen nodes inArpanet by 1972, thirty-seven nodes. And it was good.As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link toARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled,at least until1983,when its military segment broke off and became MILNET. TCP/IP became morecommon,entire other networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet,andmessily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public domain and hebasic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature,it asdifficult to stop people from barging in linking up somewhere or other.