1960 Paul Baran conceives the digital distributed network.
Paul Baran (of the Rand Corporation) took it upon himself to analyse the potential impact of a nuclear strike on communications. He realised that the military’s ability to ‘control and command’, for example, retaliatory strikes could be seriously limited due to the vulnerability of traditional long distance communications systems.

He came to the conclusion that a robust and reliable communications system can be created by linking each station to a number of others, rather than to a single central point. As a result each station has the ability to send or receive a message by a number of connections, so if one link fails, or is destroyed, there are others available. Each station may be sent information that is not for it, but simply to be passed on, until it reaches the station it is destined for. This is called a distributed network, and has the advantage that there are many paths that a message can take to get to its destination. Baran concluded that if each station was connected to 3 or 4 other stations then the network would be able to cope extremely well even if large parts of it were destroyed.

As each message may have to be sent through a number of stations, Baran realised that it would be best to send the messages digitally. This is because analogue signals tend to degrade if they are passed through too many switches. He also found that the network would perform more efficiently if the messages are broken down into “message blocks”, smaller chunks of information, each of which is sent separately over the network before being reassembled at the destination.

Despite working hard to persuade people that such a network would work, after five years he puts it to one side without any real success.