win. He moved onto the next stop. Same result. And the next. Same result. Eventually Baran’s engineering colleagues back at RAND were so affronted by the routine dismissal of his logic that they spoke up. They had seen the classified briefings. They knew just how easily the nation could be hobbled - and their Santa Monica building was surely on some target list somewhere too. RAND’s scientists demanded a detailed, critical study of the “distributed network model”. By the time they were finished, the Air Force was preparing to begin construction. Survivability. Plucked from that impossible looking puzzle was the first honestly distributed network. You can sense the power of this inversion: A network with no central control, survivable, uncuttable. The earliest large network built on the Baran’s principles became known as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Project Agency NETwork - a mesh of connections that, even today, serves as the backbone for parts of the Internet. Even with the risk of nuclear war (hopefully) long gone, packet switching networks of one sort or another still account for most of the data moving in the world. Think of how true, how heat-hardened and useful an idea must be to endure more than fifty years of technological change. And all the efficiencies Baran first predicted 50 years ago on his slide rules are still at work. Every time you make a call, share a video or ask a machine to think for you, that whole transaction likely takes place through fishnet routed packets. If we had stayed with that old AT&T model, we'd be living in a different world. Riots would be flipped off with a single switch. Data flows would be monitored with the ease of watching a subway turnstile. The far flung, wild creativity of our plug-and-play connected world would be stilted, stifled. Each additional connection to the system would demand bureaucratic central approval by the Switch Despots, concerned more with their own power more than their survival. Instead, we have a sl