Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
19 The 'experimental
pointing device'
(a precursor of the
modern computer
mouse)
,
designed by
Douglas Engelbart
and the Augmentation
Research Center at
the Stanford Research
Institute in late 1963
or early 1964.
Soon after, in
Paul Baran, of the defence think-tank RAND
Corporation, wrote a paper concerning strategies for maintaining
communications in event of a nuclear war. In 'On Distributed Com-
munications'
29
he proposed that a communications system should
be set up without any centre. Instead a network should be set up
composed of equal nodes, so that should any part be destroyed,
messages could continue to flow along other routes (illus.
1962,
20
). In
the '
s work was done at RAND, MIT and UCLA looking at the
feasibility of building such a communications system using com-
puters, and incorporating the idea of 'packet switching' - sending
computer data in small chunks to be reassembled at their destina-
tion. (This was an idea developed separately by Baran and an English
scientist, Donald Davies, who also coined the term 'packet switch-
ing'.) Contrary to legend, the Internet was not developed because
of Baran's paper, and thus was not directly conceived as a response
to the dangers of nuclear attack. Nevertheless his idea of packet
switching solved many of the logistical problems of complex net-
works. IPTO and ARPA were very interested in Baran's ideas, and
had under-taken or sponsored much relevant research. In
60
they
decided to fund a project to develop such a network on a large
scale. In Autumn,
1967
, four computers, known as Interface Message
Processors (IMPs), in UCLA, Stanford, University of California,
Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were linked (illus.
1969
21
). This
