While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by [...] It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP
For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth. I wasn't there, but according to someone who was:
<http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/2004-April/003940.html> We'll probably never resolve this question entirely, but a simple internetwork (partial mesh, not too big) running RIP does seem to be able to survive in the face of multiple failures. Presumably, the network view of a nuclear war would be multiple failures. In any case, I think that you have to go further back to find the roots of this story. Paul Baran came up with the basic ideas of packet-switching and partial mesh networks which are the foundation of the Internet. There is a nice explanation of this on his bio page here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/baran.html I think Dave Reed should have just said to the reporter that the Internet survived 9/11 so well because it was largely a non-centralized network that does not depend on any kind of central traffic control. It's like a road network where every driver(packet) is free to detour around obstructions. Remember the information highway? --Michael Dillon