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Jul-16 2004: CallTheWatsons.com and the Cold War!
E-mail and the Internet have become such a significant
part of our lives. After all, you're reading this on e-mail, aren't you?
But have you ever stopped to think where it all started?
Well,
the first long-distance computer-to-computer communication actually occurred in
our part of the world. In 1968 a computer at Stanford University talked to a
number of others in California and Utah. But the actual reason for WHY computers
started talking to each other goes back a little further.
In 1962, at
the height of the Cold War, the US Air Force began a study on how it could
maintain control over its nuclear missiles and bombers in the event of a
first-strike by the Russians. The result of this study was a system of
independent computers communicating with each other through a
"packet-switched-network."
The essence of this network is the sending of
a piece of information wrapped in a "packet" or "datagram" containing the
sender's address, the recipient's address and a request to relay the information
until the recipient receives it. In this way these "datagrams" could be sent out
across the entire network, and if one or more computers had been taken out by a
nuclear strike, the message would likely have reached its destination by way of
several other relaying computers.
The sender-recipient information of
the "datagram" format together with the decentralized and redundant nature of
the network, is the same basis of the Internet 40 years later. Of course, the
technology has evolved since then with e-mail, web browsing and domain names
(www.callthewatsons.com, for example).
But, basically the Internet as we
know it today was fashioned in a secret US Military Cold War laboratory over 40
years ago. Interestingly, one benefit remaining from this time period of high
international tension and intrigue is that within seconds you can reach us at
http://www.callthewatsons.com. Isn't that something?