Historical overview of Baran's distributed network model and ARPANET development

win. He moved onto the next stop. Same result. And the next. Same result. Eventually Baran’s engineering colleagues back at RAND were so affronted by the routine dismissal of his logic that they spoke up. They had seen the classified briefings. They knew just how easily the nation could be hobbled - and their Santa Monica building was surely on some target list somewhere too. RAND’s scientists demanded a detailed, critical study of the “distributed network model”. By the time they were finished, the Air Force was preparing to begin construction. Survivability. Plucked from that impossible looking puzzle was the first honestly distributed network. You can sense the power of this inversion: A network with no central control, survivable, uncuttable. The earliest large network built on the Baran’s principles became known as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Project Agency NETwork - a mesh of connections that, even today, serves as the backbone for parts of the Internet. Even with the risk of nuclear war (hopefully) long gone, packet switching networks of one sort or another still account for most of the data moving in the world. Think of how true, how heat-hardened and useful an idea must be to endure more than fifty years of technological change. And all the efficiencies Baran first predicted 50 years ago on his slide rules are still at work. Every time you make a call, share a video or ask a machine to think for you, that whole transaction likely takes place through fishnet routed packets. If we had stayed with that old AT&T model, we'd be living in a different world. Riots would be flipped off with a single switch. Data flows would be monitored with the ease of watching a subway turnstile. The far flung, wild creativity of our plug-and-play connected world would be stilted, stifled. Each additional connection to the system would demand bureaucratic central approval by the Switch Despots, concerned more with their own power more than their survival. Instead, we have a slice-resistant mesh that has grown by a billion times over, with its original architecture largely intact. Packet switched systems such as the Internet mean that anyone with some string and an ability to tie knots (which, in tech-speak, is anyone with some blinking fiber optics and a TCP/IP connection) can add themselves into the global web. They can connect. They can share. Practically, this is why you can so easily snap your phone or tablet on and touch, more or less instantly, a whole world of data. Every minute now an additional 10,000 devices are connected to the Internet. Medical tools, Bitcoin mines, airplane diagnostic systems - and of course wired citizens, smart- phones and laptops and tablets. This ease of connection is an implicit part of a Seventh Sense worldview. Anyone can connect. It’s as fundamental as Luther’s “Let anyone can speak to God.” Or Kant’s “Dare to know.” When someone says “Why would anyone want to share photos with the world?” or “Why would you ever hand your DNA over?” they are missing the point that many objects now are only complete or useful once they’re connected. When we say “connection changes the nature of an object” we’re nodding towards the idea that constant connection is almosta kind of right for devices and programs and people. Anyhow, it is certainly a kind of yearning. When we described network power as stretched between distribution and concentration, we should understand too that it is this design of Baran’s that 82 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018314