The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false. As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It's uncited in the book, I've got a copy.
Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil in 1975 and you'd have no way of knowing if it was real.
And then it would traverse in a nondeterministic unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can get it there with no way of knowing whether it succeeded or whether the message received was the message sent.
It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing and it ran mostly on minicomputers, not even mainframes. All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly
0 were on military bases.
The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at, technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor, Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None of this suggests military purpose
Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email, rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use?
It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through IIASA, you know, cause that's how cold war things happened - open door policy to the enemy
Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic to pass through it.
Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just anyone - extremely valuable information for your enemies.
Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel lookup tool. You could use it to get people's schedule, all the people who work under them, what they're doing, how to contact them, where they last logged in at - do you know what I'd really like to have as your military enemy?
Heck let's cite Wikipedia as if reality matters:
"20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with."
Sending out spies, espionage, sabotage, all unnecessary if you're enemy is using this technology. You could do it all from a terminal.
There's zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking.
Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I'm committed to reality far more than being popular. My politics are on the far left btw, that's why I demand such high standards from these people. They're supposedly playing for my team. But let me tell you, they don't seem to care either.
> The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false
It's actually true, more or less. Bob Kahn's initial motivation for thinking about internetworking was in order to connect PRNET[0], a packet radio network intended for possible field use by the Army (by using mobile trucks as stations), with the computing power in ARPANET.
> As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack
PRNET is based on Aloha, which was already part of a functional ARPANET which had been operational for over 6 years before his 1975 theoretical paper.
Citing an academic paper published years after something was built as the inspiration for building that something is just not possible. It'd be like saying Facebook is why Tim Berners Lee made the World Wide Web.
The narrative isn't physically possible regardless of arguments because that's simply not how time works.
Here's an early network diagram btw. IMP is the network device by BBN (they're still around in mini-museums at some of these sites):
The GE-645 at MIT there is the multics machine. The TX-2 at Lincoln Labs was Sutherland's machine he did sketchpad on while that link at Utah is the one that Martin Newell used to collaborate on his Bézier control points in constructing the Utah Teapot in 1975.
Every one of these links has a story to tell. None of them however involve wars, battlefields or bombs. I've dedicated years of study to computing history - it's not a supported hypothesis unless you want to handwave and string unrelated things together.
DARPA which provided some of the cash, which is the only real link there is, was really unhappy because these researchers just used them for their money - they didn't work on or produce results for them. Go read "where wizards stay up late" for very detailed drama surrounding this.
There's a typo at UCLA btw, that's an SDS, not an XDS Sigma 7 (It's a weird typo because it was later sold off to Xerox and got renamed the XDS 4 years later. But here, it's a typo because again, that's how time works). The Illiac IV at Burroughs would have been very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILLIAC_IV
I think you're just inferring something that isn't there at all in the OP. Here's what it says:
> The book takes us through a series of key moments in the development of the internet: 1969, when the publicly owned Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the first public computer network that became a forerunner to the internet, went live for the first time; 1976, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) linked two networks for the first time in pursuit of its goal to “bring the mainframe to the battlefield”;
The only mention of a military application is related to the event of DARPA linking two networks for the first time. This is in fact what happened. That event has nothing to do with the creation of ARPANET, which is clearly mentioned here as a distinct, earlier event. There's no other mention in the article of a military motivation for the creation of the Internet, or other computer technology.
I've heard the author interviewed twice on leftist podcasts and they also drop the "mainframe on the battlefield" thing in the introduction, on both ...
You can read work from actual scholars on this supposed connection, like say Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, Haymarket Books, 2020
It's 316 pages talking about silicon valley's cozy relationship with the defense department. Unlike the tech journalist Ben Tarnoff, Rob Larson is a professional historian and so you will note the phantom connection is absent from his work.
And it's not like Haymarket Books is politically divergent from Verso, Larson's just a more careful writer.
I feel compelled to point inaccurate things out because if people actually take heed and do their diligence on it, using reality should help them better analyze the world around them.
We should all strive to have as little nonsense as possible when we're trying to be serious.
Everyone loves a Tom Clancy secret spy story but here it gets substituted as if it were the primary sole purpose
It's true that one of its uses is to verify nuclear test ban treaties because that's how you got government money for research in the 1970s
You can see from the documents the myriad of scientific use cases for these systems such as moving towards a global computer based weather model
You can also see from say, the Wikipedia page, it was how people got SATNET up so there could be a European link to systems like JANET
The problem with the Clancy stuff is it's supposed hidden. So when the evidence isn't there that it's a central player, well that's because it was secret
Then in cases when there's really no evidence and it's genuinely absent well that's because it was super duper tippity top secret.
So we get these narratives of "well the real reason was a clandestine program with sunglasses and trenchcoat wearing feds that of course there's only rumors of and all of the computing time and resources are allocated for but I swear it's being downplayed"
Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil in 1975 and you'd have no way of knowing if it was real.
And then it would traverse in a nondeterministic unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can get it there with no way of knowing whether it succeeded or whether the message received was the message sent.
It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing and it ran mostly on minicomputers, not even mainframes. All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly 0 were on military bases.
The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at, technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor, Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None of this suggests military purpose
Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email, rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use?
It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through IIASA, you know, cause that's how cold war things happened - open door policy to the enemy
Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic to pass through it.
In 1997, a misbehaving router singlehandedly took down the net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident any enemy could have easily done this.
Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just anyone - extremely valuable information for your enemies.
Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel lookup tool. You could use it to get people's schedule, all the people who work under them, what they're doing, how to contact them, where they last logged in at - do you know what I'd really like to have as your military enemy?
Heck let's cite Wikipedia as if reality matters:
"20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with."
Sending out spies, espionage, sabotage, all unnecessary if you're enemy is using this technology. You could do it all from a terminal.
There's zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking.
Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I'm committed to reality far more than being popular. My politics are on the far left btw, that's why I demand such high standards from these people. They're supposedly playing for my team. But let me tell you, they don't seem to care either.