“The early simulations,” Baran recalled, “showed that after the hypothetical network

“The early simulations,” Baran recalled, “showed that after the hypothetical network was 50% instantly destroyed, the surviving pieces of the network reconstituted themselves within a half a second.” That was a way of saying that his messages were finding new routes on the network even after huge parts of the system had been taken off line. And they were doing it nearly instantly. Better still, as he began to model these fishnet, “distributed” networks, Baran discovered that they were not only capable of surviving attack, they were also incredibly efficient. “If built and maintained at a cost of $60 million (1964 Dollars),” he calculated, his design would, “handle the long distance telecommunications within the Department of Defense that was costing the taxpayer about $2 billion a year.” Baran travelled the country for most of 1961 and 1962, classified presentation and slide-rules in hand, trying to persuade skeptical generals, engineers and other scientists. It was, he found, a nearly impossible task. He recalled a visit to the towering AT&T switching headquarters on Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. It was,an implacable temple of the high-priests of hub-and-spoke network design. That one building handled more telephone and telex traffic than nearly any other single point on earth. Surely the place was very high on the USSR first-strike list for exactly that reason. So Baran expected a friendly reception. After all, he’d be telling a bunch of men with a uranium death sentence that he’d found a way to get them off the Soviet target list. His new “mesh” network would mean that bombing AT&T would be largely pointless. It wouldn’t blind US commanders. If only they’d redesign their network, the AT&T engineers might save their own lives. They thought he was insane. “I tried to explain packet switching to a senior telephone company executive. In mid- sentence he interrupted me, “ Baran recalled. “The old analog engineer looked stunned. He looked at his colleagues in the room while his eyeballs rolled up, sending a signal of his utter disbelief. He paused for a while, and then said, ‘Son, here’s how a telephone works...” Of course Paul Baran knew how a telephone worked. You jacked one point to a switch to another point. That was the problem. This was why AT&Ts design would be absolutely useless in the face of the catastrophe he’d been told to prevent. Baran was, nerve and blood and bone, as an analyst, and even as a refugee perhaps, alive with the imperative of survivability, of how connection might mean the difference between war and peace. Those morons in the AT&T building? What the hell could they be worrying about? But it wasn’t just that $2 billion annual check from the US Defense Department those wizened phone wizards were seeing vanish in Baran’s fishnet, it was a whole way of thinking. The AT&T scientists wanted to control the addresses, the routes, the timing of messages from the center. This sort of authoritarian design appeared more efficient to them; perhaps it was even more psychologically comfortable since it matched their own experience of being commanded and controlled. Kar] Wittfogel, the historian who identified the water totalitarians of ancient China or Egypt, would have recognized them: Switch Despots! “We had arrived at a conceptual impasse,” Baran reflected with the mild confidence of a man who knows he will eventually 81 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018313