[ih] ARPAnet and nuclear survivability

[jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Vint Cerf <vint at google.com>

    > the purpose of arpanet was resource sharing.

Indeed; people seem to have a hard time keeping straight that Baran's work,
the ARPANet, and the Internet were three different systems with different
goals, etc.


    > the Internet project at DARPA, however, I did want to show resilience
    > so we demonstrated this

There were also lots of references in meetings at the time to C3I, military
applications, etc, etc. (As one would expect from DARPA at that point, since
Congress had directed that its work be more immediately military-relevant,
IIRC.)

There was also a contemporaneous proposal which I saw, which some people in
another group in LCS at MIT were associated with, to build a survivable
strategic command-and-control system; part of the concept was for data to be
kept in a distributed database which used replication for reliability in a
high-loss environment, but the communication was all TCP/IP, IIRC.

Between them, that all caused me a certain amount of heartburn at the time
(we're talking circa '79 or so), and pondering whether I really wanted to
work on something that could be used for strategic C+C. I wound up deciding
that it was morally OK to work on it because it was inherently a second-stike
thing (by definition, you pretty much don't need a survivable C+C system for
a first strike :-).

	Noel