[cousin_it]

Altruist? DARPA is a military agency, ARPANET was a prototype network designed to survive a nuclear strike. I think the grandparent comment's point is that the innovation was government-funded and made available openly; none of which depends on the slightest on its being altruist.

[tremon]

The resilience of ARPANET was influenced by CYCLADES, which was developed in French Academia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES

> The CYCLADES network was the first to make the hosts responsible for the reliable delivery of data, rather than this being a centralized service of the network itself. Datagrams were exchanged on the network using transport protocols that do not guarantee reliable delivery, but only attempt best-effort [..] The experience with these concepts led to the design of key features of the Internet Protocol in the ARPANET project

Keeping with the theme of the thread, CYCLADES was destroyed because of greed:

> Data transmission was a state monopoly in France at the time, and IRIA needed a special dispensation to run the CYCLADES network. The PTT did not agree to funding by the government of a competitor to their Transpac network, and insisted that the permission and funding be rescinded. By 1981, Cyclades was forced to shut down.

[msla]

https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/

> Rumors had persisted for years that the ARPANET had been built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear attack. It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long enough to become widely accepted as fact.

No, the Internet (inclusive of ARPANET, NSFNet, and so on) was not designed to survive a nuclear war. It's the worst kind of myth: One you can cite legitimate sources for, because it's been repeated long enough even semi-experts believe it.

The ARPANET was made to help researchers and to justify the cost of a mainframe computer:

> It's understandable how it could spread. Military communications during Nuclear War makes a more memorable story than designing a way to remote access what would become the first massively parallel computer, the ILLIAC IV. The funding and motivation for building ARPANET was partially to get this computer, once built, to be "online" in order to justify the cost of building it. This way more scientists could use the expensive machine.

[cousin_it]

That's a valiant attempt at myth-fighting, but it doesn't fully convince me. For example, one hop to Wikipedia gives this:

> Later, in the 1970s, ARPA did emphasize the goal of "command and control". According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who was deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975):

> "The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making."

[throw0101a]

> That's a valiant attempt at myth-fighting, but it doesn't fully convince me. For example, one hop to Wikipedia gives this:

And in that same Wikipedia section there are 3-4 other people, including Herzfeld, who was the guy/director who authorized the actual starting of the project, who say otherwise:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Creation

Meanwhile you cherrypick 1-2 paragraphs at the end, while there are over a dozen that say the opposite. Note that Kukasik was later the director of DARPA, which had a completely different mandate that (no-D) ARPA.

[msla]

Why do you lie?

[fellowniusmonk]

Any technology that is developed to be federated and resilient in the face of apocalyptic events is definitionaly altruistic toward humanity.