By: Janet Abatte
Key Ideas:
- Both an experimental project in packet switching technology + practical resource sharing endeavor with implications of a “survivable” communication network.
- Layering/Abstraction:
- Not only for technical complexity - abstraction
- Way to enforce social relations.
Chapter 1: Packet Switching
- Easy to think that it was adopted because it was a “better technology.” Far from established. It was not clear how to define it, or implement.
- Part of what attracted so much attention from Computer Science academia in ARPANET was as a first experiment of large scale implementation of Packet Switching.
- Goals of the miltary of “survivability” and “high capacity” built into the design of the internet. Emerged out of a need for a robust communication structure that could still exist “amidst an escaliting nuclear war.”
- Civilian intellectual activity, concentrated at RAND - the blank check, high prestige and open ended
- Individual political idealogy of engineers impacted the direction of government policy on questions of quite literal existential proportio.s
- It was apparent to engineers and civilians who were consulting for such a large, beurocratic organization that their work impacted them.
- Baran - “distrubted communication” - designed the network to be “fault tolerant” with multiple stations each with excess capacity, away from population centers.
- Baran wasn’t the first to think about decentralized communication. However his innovation:
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- Decentralized control - i.e each node had the capacity to make routing decisons. Which necessitated networks of Computers, rather than a seperate transmission network of telephone switches.
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- Led to the transmission of DIGITAL singals over ANALOG signals
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