The ARPANET and nuclear attacks
A common semi-myth about the ARPANET states that it was designed to be resistant to nuclear attack. The Internet Society writes about the merger of technical ideas that produced the ARPANET in A Brief History of the Internet, and states in a note:
- It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming
that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to
nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated (sic) RAND
study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work
on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including
the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying
networks.
The myth
that the ARPANET was built to withstand nuclear attacks however remains
such a strong and apparently appealing idea — and of course “a good
story” — that many people refuse to believe it is not true. However it
is not, unless one means that these ideas influenced the
ARPANET development by way of the RAND research papers. The ARPANET was
designed to survive network losses, but the main reason was actually
that the switching nodes and network links were not highly reliable,
even without any nuclear attacks.
Eddig én is az atomcsapásos verziót ismertem, minden nap tanul az ember valamit.
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