[fzzzy]

Actually, the original engineering and architecture of the internet was intended to provide reliable command & control in the event of a nuclear war. A network of last resort. I can't think of anything more mission critical than that.

[late2part]

No, it wasn't. That's a myth, disturbed in many sources, including [1]. Also in [2]:

Many people have heard that the Internet began with some military computers in the Pentagon called Arpanet in 1969. The theory goes on to suggest that the network was designed to survive a nuclear attack. However, whichever definition of what the Internet is we use, neither the Pentagon nor 1969 hold up as the time and place the Internet was invented. A project which began in the Pentagon that year, called Arpanet, gave birth to the Internet protocols sometime later (during the 1970's), but 1969 was not the Internet's beginnings. Surviving a nuclear attack was not Arpanet's motivation, nor was building a global communications network.

Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or Arpanet) program, insists that the purpose was not military, but scientific. The nuclear attack theory was never part of the design. Nor was an Internet in the sense we know it part of the Pentagon's 1969 thinking. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Bob Taylor to build the Arpanet network, states that Arpanet was never intended to link people or be a communications and information facility.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...

[2] http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/beg...

[fapjacks]

Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a fairly dry book, but it contains interesting kernels of information (like this). It's not a page turner, but it's worth a read if you are interested in things like, for example, the information in this comment's parent.

[eternalban]

A few oral history interviews with key actors also confirm this.

[mycall]

> Arpanet was about time-sharing. Time sharing tried to make it possible for research institutions to use the processing power of other institutions computers when they had large calculations to do that required more power, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.

Arpanet is distributed shared information for science. Nuclear technology is science. Surviving science is a war that requires nuclear insights. Therefore, the Arpanet was developed for surviving nuclear war.

[sverige]

As Aristotle might have said if he were here, you committed an error in syllogism number 56.

[braveo]

And yet I suspect the government could pick up a phone, hop in a vehicle, etc and communicate with the right people.

Which means it falls under what he said.

[cognivore]

ARPANET is nothing like the monstrosity we have today.