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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wizzer who wrote (1149)	4/13/1998 8:26:00 AM
From: appro	Respond to of 4710

Here is an excerpt from "Inventing the Internet Again" by George Gilder. The complete article is an interesting look at a compelling future seas.upenn.edu >>Plunging deeper into history than Kennedy had, Baran resolved to design a communications system that could survive a nuclear attack and save the second-strike deterrent. He took inspiration from another idea of MIT's McCullough-a parallel computer system with adaptive redundancy. Like the human brain, such a system could reconfigure itself to work even after portions were destroyed. But using the noise-prone analog circuits of the time, it was impossible to build the necessary switches. Baran concluded that all the traffic would have to be digital. Moreover, the digital traffic would have to be broken into short message blocks now called "packets," each containing its own routing information, like a DNA molecule, and able to replicate itself correctly whenever a transmission error occurred. With many additions and permutations, his original design is today termed the Internet, and it is shaping the emerging history of the 21stcentury.<<