Episode 9 - Networking for a Nuclear War, the Soviets

Advent of Computing

Often times people assume the US is the homeland of the internet. Funded by the US Department of Defence, the first attempts at a large-scale network were started during the height of the Cold War, and a large part of it's design was redundancy and robust-ness. Some of the researchers were quite frank about it's purpose: to create a network that could survive an upcoming nuclear war. This military-hardened infrastructure was known as ARPANET.

But that's only part of the story, and the US wasn't the first to the party. The fact is, the internet was born during the Cold War. This was an era that saw huge advancements in science, both for better and for worse. The space race put humans on the moon, and the nuclear arms race put humans dangerously close to annihilation. So it should be no surprise that America's counterpart in this age, the Soviet Union, was working towards their own proto-internet.