Consilient Network· The graph of everyone who built this · Add your entry ↗
Concept path

The internet exists because of a requirement my grandfather wrote

The internet exists because somebody had to guarantee that command could still reach the missile silos after a first strike. The man who wrote that requirement is Hare's grandfather.

6 stopsFor: Anyone who wants to know where packet switching actually came fromAll paths
Most people do not know why the protocols were invented. Bill Joy knew.
The path

Follow it in order

Each stop is a page in the graph. The order is an argument — but every one of them is also a door into the rest of it, so you can leave the path wherever it stops being useful.

01My grandfather ran the Titan II program, stood up ARPA, and has a 200-word obituaryDeputy director at the Johns Hopkins Operations Research Office, first acting Director of ARPA by family account, and the man who ran the division that built the Titan II.→02The Johns Hopkins office where Mutual Assured Destruction was worked outWhere Mutual Assured Destruction was worked out, using game theory and simulation.→03The Titan II: the missile whose silos required the internetThe second-strike arm. The silos that had to launch after the first strike had already landed.→04ARPANET and the Titan II silosKeeping command able to reach them once everything above ground was gone is the survivable-communications problem that produced packet switching.→05Bill Joy: “Bill knew.”Wrote the BSD implementation that the problem eventually produced. Hare told him about his grandfather on their first call.→06UC Berkeley: a 2.7 forced curve and twenty-nine Nobel laureatesOperations research, one generation later. The grandson read the discipline whose American society his grandfather founded.→
Where it lands

What the path is for

The point

The internet's founding requirement was coordination that survives the loss of the center. That is also this architecture's founding requirement, three generations later, applied to obligation and value rather than to packets.

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