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Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)

Silicon Folklore

…says University of Pennsylvania Telecommunications Professor David Farber, “that the Internet is actually a cold war relic, designed in the 1960s as a decentralized military communications system capable of surviving a nuclear attack. The Internet evolved from a computer system built 25 years ago by the Defense Department to enable academic and military researchers to continue to do government work even if part of the network were taken out in a nuclear attack. “There should have been a definition of the relationship between a man and his program, as a unit, and the distant central machine or other data processing gear with which they are working.” In other words, Mills believes ARPA put the cart before the horse by going ahead on interconnecting computers before determining what the benefits of such a network would be.

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