A Brief History Of The Internet :: essays research papers

A Brief History of the Internet Within our society there has been a revolution, one that rivals that of the Industrial Revolution. The Technological Revolution. At the head of this revolution is the Internet. A place full of information, adventure, and even for some, romance. In our society today everyone has heard of this technological wonder, and many use it on a daily basis, but for some the question still remains†¦ What is the Internet, and where did it come from?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, American’s foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Post nuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state-to-state, and base-to-base. But no matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters. And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The network would have no central authority. Furthermore, it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The principles were simple, the network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times (Krol 11). It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes (computers hooked to the network) in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node, winding its way through the network on an individual basis (Krol 11). The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn’t matter; the pac kets would still stay air born, lateralled wildly across the network by whatever node happened to survive. A Brief History Of The Internet :: essays research papers A Brief History of the Internet Within our society there has been a revolution, one that rivals that of the Industrial Revolution. The Technological Revolution. At the head of this revolution is the Internet. A place full of information, adventure, and even for some, romance. In our society today everyone has heard of this technological wonder, and many use it on a daily basis, but for some the question still remains†¦ What is the Internet, and where did it come from?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, American’s foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Post nuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state-to-state, and base-to-base. But no matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters. And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The network would have no central authority. Furthermore, it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The principles were simple, the network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times (Krol 11). It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes (computers hooked to the network) in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node, winding its way through the network on an individual basis (Krol 11). The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn’t matter; the pac kets would still stay air born, lateralled wildly across the network by whatever node happened to survive.