Historical role
What the organisation contributed
Paul Baran's RAND work in the early 1960s developed distributed digital communications using standard message blocks, adaptive store-and-forward routing and redundancy, with survivability under attack as a major goal.
Why it mattered
Shares network links efficiently among bursty digital traffic through packetisation, buffering and forwarding without requiring a dedicated end-to-end circuit.
Connected topics
Where this fits in ITEM
Evidence
Sources and further reading
- On Distributed Communications I: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks
Paul Baran · 1964
- On Distributed Communications VIII: The Multiplexing Station
Paul Baran · 1964