Paul Baran
loreThe RAND engineer who designed the distributed network - no central switch, messages cut into blocks routed independently - in studies published from 1960 and collected in 1964 as On Distributed Communications.
He was asked to find a way for communications to survive a nuclear attack, and the answer he reached was to remove the thing that could be destroyed: the centre. He described taking inspiration from a brain routing around damaged tissue. Two details are worth carrying. The idea was resisted by the telephone company's circuit-switching engineers, who regarded it as unworkable, so the network that replaced theirs was rejected by them first. And the survivability argument is why the internet has no master switch, which is the same property that makes it hard to shut down and hard to govern.
Also known as: baran, message blocks
Sources
- Britannica - Paul Baran, distributed networks and message blocks
- National Academies memorial tribute to Paul Baran, on the RAND studies and the parallel work at NPL
- Baran, 'On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks', RAND Memorandum RM-3420-PR, which RAND records as published in 1964