Like most things, the creation of APRANET is a result of a military need. The US needed a way to quickly communicate.
Paul Baran concluded that the strongest communication system would be a distributed network of computers. This good to note as in the future computers all across the globe are networked together.
The computers would function as nodes and communicate through an interconnected path of working nodes even with the loss of a node.
Baran also described that messages should be broken down into equal sizes where they could be sent along this network
Larry Roberts looked into how the sharing of resources of one computer easily and economically with another. Nowadays, we don't even give a thought to how our devices talk to each other in Real-time as it is cool to think about.
Messages began to be broken down into sizes of data from 100kbs to 1.5mbs. Nowadays, these speeds are deemed slow, but at the time these speeds were the best a computer can do. Shows us how far computers have come
As research and publicity grew, ARPANET knew that they needed to expand to other networks.
5 stages of technological discourse; declarations, prototypes, tools, industries and widespread practice. Technology will drift through these stages in a 20-50 year timeline.
These stages can be reflected on ARPANETs up bringing.
The author covers 2 important conflicts that may arise with the network. The first is security, keeping information secure from any type of malware. In the current day people are still arguing whether information on the internet should be secured, and I think it pays tribute to the fact that no group listens to one another and this can be related to a quote by the author, "This discourse is blind to the need for introducing new practices in a world where widespread cooperation is essential."
The second conflict is trust. Higher power companies and governments are trusted not to abuse their power. This created the call for "trusted computer systems". This can be relayed to nowadays with the emergence of AI, we are to trust that the information online is true, and we are to trust that the people online are truly human.