N. 4   Los orígenes de Internet.

Aunque no hay duda sobre las fechas y las circunstancias del nacimiento de Internet, si existe bastante controversia acerca de la interpretación de que fuera precisamente la búsqueda de una respuesta para las comunicaciones estratégicas en caso de una catástrofe nuclear.  Parece que no fue la causa directa, aunque es cierto que en la época se vivía una auténtica paranoia nuclear (era frecuente construir refugios antiatómicos, y el riesgo de un "accidente" nuclear era más que posible), por otra parte parece ser que ocurrieron algunos sabotajes en torres de comunicación del Ejército Norteamericano, y desde luego, las altas esferas militares andaban histéricos con el asunto atómico.

A continuación se exponen algunas idéas al respecto tomadas de fuentes excepcionalmente bien informadas:

Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace

-----Original Message-----

From: Daniel P Dern ddern@WORLD.STD.COM

This, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the Great Network Myths.

IIRC (If I Recall Correctly), based on my reading of lotsa documents while working at BBN (83-88), the ARPAnet per se was not developed for military support. ARPAnet technology was proposed as an off-the-shelf solution for the DDN (Defense>Data Networking) program, to replace AUTODIN; here, surviveability was a key concern. Conflating these could easily account for the Arpanet origin confusion.

If I could add to this thread, I wrote a big article several years ago called about Myths of the Internet for Internet Underground. The fullarticle is at http://simson.net/clips/96.IU.MythsFacts.html. I'm told thatit doesn't work for Netscape. Here is what I wrote on the topic:

1. The Internet was developed to survive a nuclear war. Untrue! The Internet, as we know it today, was developed by a bunch of companies in the late 1980s that wanted to commercialize packet-switch technology and offer a commercial TCP/IP network to the public, but weresty mied by the Acceptable Use Policy of the National Science Foundation.

The Inter-Net[work] was actually a set of interconnections among the existing TCP/IP networks of the time. But weren't the basic TCP/IP network protocols, and the very idea of packet-switching, developed to allow the military to communicate after aglobal disaster?

Wrong again. Original packet network protocols (which bear a relationship to TCP/IP the way a child is related to great-grandparents), were designed to be resistant to momentary interruptions in militarycommunications, the kind that might happen if a bridge carrying a telephoneline gets blown up, but they weren't designed to protect against total destruction of the network's control center. It doesn't make that much sense, from a military point of view, to design anetwork that will still function after all of the generals who are supposed to use it have been vaporized. The designers of the Internet knew that different technologies, such as burying their control centers inside mountains or flying them on aircraft, would better protect them against nuclear calamities. As for the researchers who were actually building the network itself... thereal reason that they built the network was so they could exchange electronic mail on the SF-LOVERS mailing list, and telnet to the computers that had good games such as Adventure and Doctor.

Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com) Moderator: Community Memoryhttp://memex.org/community-memory.html A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org  -- cpsr@cpsr.org Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.

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