America would need a command and control network, linked from city to city, state to state and base to base. 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 bombardment would reduce any network to tatters. Any central authority would be an obvious and immediate target for enemy missiles. The center of a network would be the first place to go. So RAND mulled over this puzzle in deep military secrecy and arrived at their solution. In 1964 their proposed ideas became public. Their network would have no central authority, and it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node having its own authority to originate, pass and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified sour!
             ce node and end at some other specified destination node. The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant, only the final results counted. Each packet would be tossed around like a hot potato from node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big chunks of the network were blown away, which wouldn't matter, the packets would still stay airborne, moving across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This system was efficient in any means (especially when compared to the phone system), but it was extremely tough. In the 1960's this concept was thrown around by RAND, MIT and UCLA. In 1969 the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December of 69, there were four nodes on the network, which was called ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The nodes of the network were high-speed supercomputers. (supercomputers at the time, desktop machines now) Thanks to APRANET scientists and ...