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 o