From the Cold War to Internet Cathedral
Andrew S. Targowski · International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education · 2005
The Cold War is the reason the Internet was invented. The Internet was born as a military wide area network called ARPANET. During the 1980s, it was split into separate military and civilian networks. The latter became the Internet, and it has evolved from the contributions of many people. One contributor, Paul Baran, pioneered distributed topology and packet switching principles at RAND (1959-1964) which became the foundation of the evolving Internet. There are plenty of other contributors who provided incremental improvements to this network. Their work can be considered “bricks” of the Internet Cathedral, since it takes many years and many priests, architects, and builders to build a cathedral.