NN Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling

[pynchonoid]

Subject: Short History of the Internet by Bruce
Sterling


bruces at well.sf.ca.us
 
Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use
 
>From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION,
February 1993.
F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr
other
 
 
F&SF Science Column #5
"Internet"
 
     Some thirty  years ago, the RAND Corporation, 
America's
foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange
strategic problem.  How
could the US authorities successfully communicate 
after a nuclear
war?
     Postnuclear America would need a
command-and-control
network, linked from city to city, state to state, 
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.   The
center of the network would be the very first place to
go.
RAND mulled over this grim puzzle  in deep military
secrecy,
and arrived at a daring solution.   The RAND proposal 
(the brainchild
of RAND staffer Paul Baran)  was made public in 1964. 
 In the first
place, the network would *have no central authority.* 
  Furthermore,
it would be *designed from the beginning to operate
while
in tatters.*
     The principles were simple.  The network itself
would be
assumed to be unreliable at all times.  It would be
designed from the
get-go to transcend its own unreliability.  [...] 
     During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a
decentralized,
blastproof, packet-switching network was kicked around
by RAND,
MIT and UCLA.  The National Physical Laboratory in
Great Britain set
up the first test network on these principles in 1968.
    Shortly
afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects
Agency decided
to fund a larger, more ambitious project in the USA.
[...]  By
December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant
network, which
was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor.  [...] 
Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew.  Its
decentralized
structure made expansion easy.   [...]  As the use of
TCP/IP became more common, entire other
networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet
[...] 
     In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into
the act,
through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing.  
The new NSFNET
set a blistering pace for technical advancement,
linking newer,
faster, shinier supercomputers, through thicker,
faster links, upgraded and
expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990.  And
other
government agencies leapt in:  NASA, the National
Institutes of
Health, the Department of Energy, each of them
maintaining a digital satrapy
in the Internet confederation.[...] ARPANET itself
formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its
own overwhelming success.  Its users scarcely noticed,
for ARPANET's
functions not only continued but steadily improved.
[...] 

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