Blog 5: The Birth of the Internet

Phase one was a very informative section of the book. It seems like we are now starting to dig down into the nitty gritty details of how the internet began and what inspired it to become a thing. It starts out by describing what the tensions were like during the Cold War. The extensive plans that went into place to try and make plans for what would happen if there was a nuclear war. One of the problems that they realized was the way in which we communicated at the time. A bomb was capable of taking out our entire network of communication just by destroying a central location that handled our communication. This is what inspired us to develop an idea that Blum talked about in the book we previously read, the ARPANET. This network was made so there was no central node. If a node was destroyed, the data would be able to be sent a different route. They also talked about how this was ahead of its time. At first, people like AT&T did not want to switch to this form of communication. After they saw how well it worked, they decided to jump on board (this was many years later). This lead to another important issue. These nodes needed to be able to communicate with each other to be able to send what they call “packets” of information. They needed a language that was universal that made it easy to send packets. They solved this by making an internet protocol. TCP/IP is what we still use today to send our packets of information from server to server over the internet.

Questions:

Do you think we would have the internet today without the Cold War?

Why do you think companies like AT&T did not embrace the idea that Baran had for a new way of communication?