Rand Corp Part 1

During the Cold War, both the US and Soviet Union were in a race to develop technology, including space exploration. However, the fear of a nuclear attack led to the need for a more reliable communication system. Rand Corporation proposed a decentralized communication system called packet switching, but it was not implemented by the military or supported by telephone companies. However, the idea was later used by ARPA for the ARPANET project. In the 1960s, America was at the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. During these years, in order to exert superiority over the other, both sides rapidly developed their technology, as seen with the space race. However, with this, tensions heightened between the two superpowers, and fear of a nuclear attack started to loom over the United States. The main method of communication was the telephone. Although a good source of communication, it had a major flaw. The centralized nature of the telephone systems of the time meant that they were likely to fail after receiving damage. To combat this, Rand Corporation was tasked with finding a solution. Rand, specifically Paul Barron, created an outline for a packet switch and decentralized communication system. A series of papers called On Distributed Communications would outline this idea and would be written in 1964. However, this was never put into practice by the military, and many telephone companies, such as AT&T, even discredited his ideas. These ideas, mainly packet switching, were later used by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, as the basis of the ARPANET project.