Historical overview of Paul Baran's early life and network concepts

Long before Paul Baran dreamed up the networks that were required to solve the “deaf, dumb and blind bomber pilot” challenge, he lived through the sort of moment that left an indelible psychological mark - one that remains visible in the revolution he made, as Luther’s lightning-bolt of faith is in the unadorned churches and simple liturgy of Lutheranism. Baran was born in Grodno, Poland in 1928. His father had an uneasy sense about what was coming to Europe and he moved the family to America when Paul was six. Pesach Baran became Paul Bran in America, a model student, a prize-winning mathematician and eventually at Hughes and Rand he established himself as one of the great American engineers of his generation. And like so many refugees of that era, the sharp, irreversible exodus left him with a question. How, exactly, to stay connected - to family, to tradition, to history? As the murderous mist of Nazism swept over Europe, the problem took on a searching urgency: How to maintain a connection, any connection, in the face of utter catastrophe? As he neared retirement decades later, Baran recalled his life’s work with this resonant line: “I was concerned,” he said, “with survivability.” The problem that animated his life as much as it did his networks. Two years after arriving at RAND, Baran began to discern the outlines to a solution to the dangerous problem of American military communications. In a series of lectures for Air Force officers starting in the summer of 1961, Baran began working his way towards an answer, speech by speech and equation by equation. He didn’t fully know where he was heading when he began the talks, he said, but he had an instinct that some other design must be out there, some completely fresh way to handle the “survivability problem” and by the end of his lecture tour, he had found it. Baran’s new design for a durable network had begun with an idea that didn’t work. The Pentagon, he’d thought, might broadcast thousands of coded messages over AM radio frequencies all at once as an attack approached. “We interrupt this program to say: It’s Christmas in July!” Missile silo commanders and bomber commanders would cluster by their transistor radios, collecting a “launch” code with the ease of listning to a late-night baseball game. That target-shaped, “Just Aim Here” web of phone lines would be replaced by something far more distributed, harder to wipe out with a single Semyorka-7 missile shot. But this approach had problems too. It relied fatally on broadcast towers and on insecure AM radio waves. But the idea of such a widespread, insidiously untargettable network got Baran thinking. Sending out the messages and letting them find their own way had a lot of appeal, if it could be done. There would be no central hubs. Information would sail over linked lines in the way radio signals moved in the air. Military communications, in Baran’s system, would bounce from point to point on this tapestry, at each stop being re-directed towards their intended destination. The resulting network, if you drew it out, would look like a fishnet: Lots of links connected to a few knotted nodes. And because the bundles of data, Baran called them packets, could be moved by the network itself, you could cut or nuke or sabotage the net in a few places and still use it. The packets would would find another path. Even a badly ripped up and irradiated network could, in theory, carry a “launch” - or a recall - message safely from the White House to a bomber pilot. 80 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018312