Did the cold war affect the development of the internet?

Did DARPA's support of the creation of the internet explicitly address cold war fears?

Numerous untruths have been disseminated about events surrounding the origins of the ARPAnet ... The ARPAnet was not an internet. An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks. The ARPAnet, with help from thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet.

_{- Robert Taylor, Director of IPTO}

ARPA created ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which was not the Internet (though its a precursor). But no, it was not created "explicitly" to address military issues. While the Cold War had some influence (as it did on just about anything during those years), it was indirect and circumstantial - contrary to persistent public misconceptions.

To start off, ARPANET was not created to survive nuclear war. This myth has been widely discredited, but somehow continues to circulate.

Bob Taylor had a couple of computer terminals speaking to different machines, and his idea was to have some way of having a terminal speak to any of them and have a network. That's really the origin of the Arpanet.

_{- Paul Baran, RAND Corporation Engineer}

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war.

_{- Leiner, Barry M., et al. "A brief history of the Internet." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Comm. Review 39.5 (2009): 22-31.}

The actual motivation for ARPANET was timesharing: in the 1960s, there was a paucity of supercomputers available. They were dispersed all around the country in academic or research institutions. ARPA already funded many of them, but researchers generally wanted their own machines - an expensive luxury at the time. Moreover, much of the hardware were state of the art, and too unique for specially written software on one platform to be easily reused on another.

Bob Taylor had succeeded Carl Licklider to the directorship of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office in 1966. Building on his predecessor's work, Taylor sought to link ARPA's computing resources together in a way that provides researchers convenient, uniform access from geographically diverse locations. That is to say, ARPANET was initiated for research purposes.

[T]he ARPAnet came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators who should have access to them were geographically separated from them.

_{- Charles Herzfeld, Director of ARPA}

Here are some facts: The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war. The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with common interests to connect to one another through interactive computing even when widely separated by geography.

_{- Robert Taylor, Director of IPTO}

Another myth, that ARPANET was funded by telling Pentagon it could survive a nuclear attack, is also specious. The project was initiated by Taylor, and approved by Herzfell, both internal to ARPA itself. The initial funding allocated was a relatively modest $1 million, out of a ~$200 million annual budget ARPA received in the 1960s.

My involvement was modest; I had to approve the program, and did so enthusiastically. As time went on, I became one of its strong supporters and explicators, especially before Congress.

_{- Charles Herzfeld, Director of ARPA}

In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project. I was Director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late '65 to late '69. There were only two people involved in the decision to launch the ARPAnet: my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, and me.

_{- Robert Taylor, Director of IPTO}

Note that this does not mean there was no Cold War influence whatsoever. After all, ARPA was created in response to the Soviet Union's technological successes, in particular the launch of Sputnik. It funded many research in order to, as its mission states, maintain the United States' technological superiority. While ARPANET itself was a research tool for these projects, the Cold War's fingerprints are all over its roots.

The point is merely that ARPANET itself was not created as a military network or to serve a military need.

As Director of ARPA at the time, I can tell you our intent. The ARPAnet was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was clearly a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried.

_{- Charles Herzfeld, Director of ARPA}

Part of the Cold War association is probably due to ARPANET's use of packet switching technology. Paul Baran at RAND Corporation, who was extensively consulted at ARPA during ARPANET's development, was a pioneer of the concept. His On Distributed Communications is usually considered to have been an influence on ARPA, and Baran had conceived of packet switching as a mechanism that could preserve communications in the event of nuclear war.

Take care to not read too much Cold War into this, however. Packet switching was independently invented in Great Britain around the same time, by Donald Davies of the National Physics Laboratory. Indeed, the term packet was coined by Davies. He went on to build a packet switching network in Britain for the NPL, and his work also found its way to the ARPA team working on ARPANET.

So on the whole ["Proposal for a Digital Communication Network"] was well received. Now one copy of it certainly went to Larry Roberts and, when I visited him in the Pentagon on one occasion, it was lying on his desk in tatters. It had obviously been very heavily thumbed and turned over, and he grilled me on a number of aspects of it.

_{- Donald Davies, CBE, FRS, Superintendent of NPL Autonomics Division}

Importantly, unlike Baran, Davies' motivation was focused around the possibility of a better public communications network - not the Cold War's nuclear threat.

There was just one major difference in their approaches. The motivation that led Davies to conceive of a packet-switching network had nothing to do with military concerns that had driven Baran. Davies simply wanted to create a new public communications network. He wanted to exploit the technical strengths he saw in digital computers and switches, to bring about a highly responsive, highly interactive computing over long distances. Such a network would have greater speed and efficiency than existing systems.

_{- Hafner, Katie. Where wizards stay up late: The origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster, 1998.}

How do the Cold War directly or indirectly influence in the development of the internet?

While Cold War concerns were not a direct factor, it did have an indirect influence. As was touched upon earlier, the Cold War sparked a technology race. The American response to perceived Soviet technological superiority was the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

ARPA went on to become the funding backbone of computer research within the United States. Several universities received its funding for a computer department, which laid the groundwork for ARPANET's arrival. All of this contributed significantly towards establishing a fertile environment for the Internet to develop in.