IanaIO's On Distributed Communications Chapter 2
On Distributed Communications Back to the Chapter One
Communication that could survive a nuclear war
In 1964, he published a paper on this concept titled "On Distributed Communications," which later contributed to the development of the ARPAnet, the research network that eventually evolved into the modern internet.
Paul Baran set out to build a means of communication that could survive a nuclear war. And he ended up inventing the fundamental networking techniques that underpin the internet.
In the early 1960s -- as an engineer with the RAND Corporation, the US armed-forces think tank founded in the wake of the Second World War -- Baran developed a new breed of communication system that could keep running even if part of it was knocked out by a nuclear blast. It was the height of the Cold War, and the nuclear threat was very much on the mind of, well, just about everyone.
Network of distributed nodes
Essentially, Baran devised a system capable of breaking communications into small packets and using a network of distributed "nodes" to transmit these packets. If one node failed, the remaining nodes would compensate.
Packet switching history
Baran's work anticipated what we now call "packet-switching," the fundamental technique for transferring information over the internet and its precursor, the ARPAnet. In a packet-switched network, data is divided into small blocks known as "packets." Although Baran didn't use this term, the network he envisioned utilized similar methods. "Paul Baran deserves recognition for conceiving this idea and demonstrating its potential benefits," says Vint Cerf, a key figure in the creation of the ARPAnet.
However, Baran wasn't alone in his thinking. Around the same time, Donald Davies at Britain's National Physical Laboratory was developing similar concepts and actually coined the term "packet-switching." Vint Cerf notes that the foundational design of the ARPAnet incorporated the work of both Baran and Davies, as well as significant contributions from Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA professor, and Larry Roberts, an engineer.
The ARPAnet was an initiative funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. In the mid-1960s, ARPA enlisted Roberts to design the network, and Kleinrock was part of the UCLA team that, in 1969, transmitted the first message between the network's initial two nodes.
There is some debate over who should be credited for the packet-switching techniques that underpinned the ARPAnet, with some questioning the significance of Baran and Davies' contributions. "Baran was focused on developing communication strategies in the event of nuclear war and proposed packet-switching as one solution, but this research was somewhat distinct from the later internet," explains Marc Weber, founding curator of the Internet History Program at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. According to Vint Cerf, this controversy wasn't fueled by Baran himself, who was known for his modesty. "He was one of the smartest and most humble engineers," Cerf says. "He rarely took credit for much and was very clear that his work at RAND did not directly lead to the creation of the ARPAnet."
Jim Pelkey, who interviewed Baran, Davies, and Roberts in the 1980s, notes that Roberts devised the initial ARPAnet design before becoming aware of Baran's research. However, Pelkey also mentions that the two met in the mid-1960s, and some of Baran's ideas, including "hot-potato" routing—a method of quickly passing packets to their next destination—directly influenced the network's architecture. "This means that if you receive a packet, you should immediately forward it elsewhere," Cerf explains.
Chapter 2
Regardless of the controversy over Baran's role in the ARPAnet, his research undeniably marked a pivotal moment in network development, shaping the way networks are constructed to this day.
Learn more, Chapter 2: [https://security.iana.io/blog/fridaydeploymentsecurityrisk]
Resources: http://www.computerhistory.org