Jorge Amodio wrote:
s/DARPA/ARPA/; s/BBM/BBN/; s/Internet/ARPAnet/.
/DARPA/ARPA/ may be splitting hairs. According to http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_roberts.htm "DARPA head Charlie Hertzfeld promised IPTO Director Bob Taylor a million dollars to build a distributed communications network". And apologies WRT /BBM/BBN/. Guess it was really has been a while now (given the 4 and 5 figure checks to BBN I signed back in the day). Sean Donelan wrote:
On Sat, 11 Apr 2009, Roger Marquis wrote:
The real problem is route redundancy. This is what the original contract from DARPA to BBM, to create the Internet, was about! "The net" was created to enable communications bttn point A and point B in this exact scenario.
Uh, not exactly. There was diversity in this case, but there was also N+1 breaks. Outside of a few counties in the Bay Area, the rest of the country's telecommunication system was unaffected. So in that sense the system worked as designed.
Read the original DARPA papers, they were not about making sure grandma could still make a phone call.
Apparently even some network operators don't yet grasp the significance of this event.
Why didn't the "man in the street" pharmacy have its own backup plans?
I assume they, as most of us, believed the government was taking care of the country's critical infrastructure. Interesting how well this illustrates the growing importance of the Internet vis-a-vis other communications channels. Roger Marquis