Maed Edrisi
B00624696
Md293661@dal.ca
Tom Robinson
HSTC1801 (5)
Single essay
What role did ARPANET play in military communization?
Advanced Research Project Agency Network (ARPANET) led to the basics of the internet in 1967 (Rouse). ARPANET was developed by the United States government during the Cold War, and it was modelled as a vertical safe for the purpose of building a powerful and reliable communication network. ARPANET was the reason the Protocol was developed in the 1970s by connecting different computers to each other. ARPANET’s name was changed to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (DARPA) in 1971, and it was the exploring branch of the United States government that created the internet (Lukasik, 2011). DARPA development was based on a defining mission, and it was independent from the rest of the military for the purpose of faster reactions and it was also a new solution to national defence challenges (Edwards, 1997). ARPANET had an important role in military communization. This is because it allowed the Americans to defend themselves better against possible nuclear attacks, kept their information secure by computers process’s called Packet-Switching, and also DARPA made the military technologies grow during the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Unions developed the first nuclear weapon, and they delivered their nuclear weapons to a target area at that point by using aircrafts. The United States had to be aware of the aircraft defence, according to The Invention of the Internet Article: “Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible” (History, 2010). The United States had to find a way to protect its communications system from the attack, so ARPANET was adapted to the military to develop technologies upon to the military requests to have a better defence against the nuclear attack. ARPANET was node to node messaging that helped the communication networks to survive during the War. ARPANET helped the military communications run during the Cold War by developing a communication network called the Distributed Network. According to Paul Baran: “a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack” (Baran, 1964). In the Distributed Network each node was connected to a few of its neighboring nodes in a kind of cross section like configuration. It did not have centralized switches anymore, so to keep communication safe from the attack if one route or neighboring node was destroyed, another path would be available (Baran, 1964). ARPANET also helped the military with the aircraft defense, according to S. J. Lukasik in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing journal: “The Air Force had already studied the need for an air defence early-warning network of radar stations and had an 85-station network of limited capability underway” (Lukasik, 2011, p.4). The previous quote shows that ARPANET has helped the United States military to stop the aircrafts that are delivering nuclear weapons by setting up an air defence using radar stations within network warning. The radars scan the aircrafts routes which helps the military to react faster by communications without losing connections to stop bombers, announce warnings, responds within a shorter time, and react with more powerful weapons.
ARPANET also helped the military to communicate and keep their information protected from other computers access which was called Packet-Switching. Packet-Switching stored the information before sending them out across the network by dividing the messages into message blocks, and rejoined them together when it had been received at their destination (Baran,1964). Packet Switching helped the military to communicate easier. According to Baran in On Distributed Communications: “survivable communications networks for the US Air Force, building on one of the
