"Bruce Sterling - Internet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling

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Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use

From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, Feb 1993.

F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other

F&SF Science Column #5



INTERNET



Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's
foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How
could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear
war?

Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control
network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no
matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its
switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of
atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any
conceivable network to tatters.

And how would the network itself be commanded and
controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would
be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The
center of the network would be the very first place to go.

RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy,
and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild
of RAND staffer Paul Baran) was made public in 1964. In the first
place, the network would *have no central authority.* Furthermore,
it would be *designed from the beginning to operate while
in tatters.*

The principles were simple. The network itself would be
assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the
get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network
would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own
authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The
messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet