Paul Baran of RAND worked (and published) on concepts that would become key to the internet, such as non-centralized, fully distributed networks. He aimed to achieve “almost unlimited resilience and survivability” through redundancy. He also developed packet switching, which splits a message into packets measuring a few bytes, which then follow different paths to the target, where they are reassembled. Baran’s stated goal, starting in 1955 (the year of the first Soviet H-bomb test), was to build a military system that could survive a Soviet thermonuclear attack, thus effectively deterring it. His work culminated in the 11-volume publication, “On Distributed Communications,” in 1964, which he insisted he would not keep secret under any circumstances, since “it would work better if the Russians had a similar system.”
