Electronic publishing: politics and pragmatics

In 1958, America and Canada formed the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) to coordinate data from radar stations monitoring the airspace over the North Pole.Contrary to Vannevar Bush's prediction, InterContinental Ballistic Missiles had turned out to be entirely feasible and in response to this new threat a NORAD command and control centre was built inside the hollowed-out Cheyenne Mountain next to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.The new weapons, ICBMs, were too fast to be tracked by the existing computers and through the 1960s the military's need for faster processing and secure communications across the continent drove research in electronics.The breakthrough came from a reproduction technology invented for commercial book publishing and refined by into a fine-art by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin: lithography.Rather than wiring individual components together, transistors, diodes, capacitors, and resistors of microscopic size could be lithographically printed directly onto semiconductor material, to make an Integrated Circuit, or microchip.In a delightful irony, the technology of printing remains at the heart of the digital revolution.A second breakthrough was in networking.In the early 1960s Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, a non-profit research and development organization funded by the American government (mostly the military), invented--or, more precisely, made explicit the application of--two techniques that would allow a military communications network to continue working efficiently even after many of its nodes and its links had been destroyed: packet switching and distributed networking.Baran's research appeared as a collection of Rand Memoranda reports for the American Air Force, deposited at the Defense Documentation Center in Virginia, and was subsequently published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (Baran 1964).The packet switching method broke all communications into small, regularly formatted, units, each of which was sent off to find its destination independently and by whatever route it could.The distributed network model for connecting computers eschewed the common-sense (and militarily familiar) principle that each node (computer centre) had to be highly reliable and had to have a highly reliable link to a few others, and instead proposed that many relatively unreliable nodes should have many relatively unreliable links to many others.In the event of nodes and links failing, the intelligent and on-the-fly routing around the sites of failure would ensure that the network as a whole continued to work even when substantial proportions of it had been destroyed.The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) embodying this technology first connected 4 university computer sites in 1969, and in 1972 it explicitly acquired the adjective 'defense' to become DARPANET, which became the Internet.Whilst it is not quite true that the Internet was invented to provide military communications that could survive a surprise nuclear attack--and hence enable an American retaliatory nuclear strike--the collaboration between military and academic research that Vannevar Bush initiated made such convergence virtually inevitable.Thus seemingly rational people were openly planning for reprisal in the event that hundreds of millions of their fellows were murdered with the new weapons technology.

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