Packet
switching
At the tip of the problem lay the
issue of connecting separate physical networks to form one logical network.
During the 1960s, Paul Baran (RAND Corporation) produced a study of survivable networks for
the US military. Information transmitted across Baran's network would be
divided into what he called 'message-blocks'. Independently, Donald Davies
(National Physical Laboratory, UK),
proposed and developed a similar network based on what he called
packet-switching, the term that would ultimately be adopted. Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) developed a mathematical theory behind this
technology. Packet-switching provides better bandwidth utilization and response
times than the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony,
particularly on resource-limited interconnection links.[6]
Packet switching is a rapid
store-and-forward networking design that divides messages up into arbitrary
packets, with routing decisions made per-packet. Early networks used message switched systems that required rigid routing structures prone to single point of failure. This led Tommy Krash and Paul Baran's U.S. military funded
research to focus on using message-blocks to include network redundancy.[7]
The widespread urban legend that the Internet was designed to resist a nuclear
attack likely arose as a result of Baran's earlier work on packet switching,
which did focus on redundancy in the face of a nuclear "holocaust."[8][9]
