In the first chapter of Inventing the Internet1 Abbate writes about the development of packet-switching as a way to illustrate how technologies can be socially constructed. I think this chapter also does a good job at pointing out how exactly early networking development was done with military interests in mind by talking about how one of the developers of the TCP/IP packet switching protocol saw packet-switching almost solely in terms of how it would be beneficial to the military.
The method of data transmission that the Internet uses today called “packet-switching” was developed by Paul Baran, a computer researcher at the Rand Cooperation in the United States. Baran’s version of packet-switching meant that messages would be digitized and sent across networks in the form of ones and zeros (bits). The bits of data in a message would be broken down into fixed-size units called “message blocks” or packets (1024 bits per block) and sent across networks. Each block of data was sent to its destination across different routes and had to be reassembled at its destination. Breaking messages down and sending them in this way would make it harder for other militaries to intercept or eavesdrop on them. Transmitting data through packet-switching also allowed for more users to share a single communication channel more efficiently. Baran saw how packet-switching would enable greater survivability and flexibility and efficiency in military communications. As Abbate mentions, Baran’s system made perfect sense in the context of the Cold War.
This concept was not immediately popular among academic computer scientists since most of them did not see how survivability of communications would be applicable to their own interests in the field. Baran started developing his packet switching system in the 60s and just a few years later computer researcher Donald Davies began developing his version of this system at the National Physical Laboratory in England. Davies saw the efficiency of packet-switching as a way to “provide affordable interactive computing”(Abbate, 27). Davies was interested in building a National Network that had an intelligible user interface and would bring down the cost of data communications in order to build a commercial system. Since the data was being broken down and sent in different packets this meant that it would be sent across networks in turns instead of one after the other. If a user had a message that was small enough to be sent in one packet (block of 1024 bits), their message would not have to wait for the message that takes up 20 packets of data to finish sending. Davies saw this as a huge advantage for his system that had the goal of being used by everyday civilians. After presenting his work for the first time Davies was informed by a member of the British Ministry of Defense that Baran had already invented this a few years prior. Abbate makes a good point about how Davies being informed about Baran’s work by a member of the military just shows the different social contexts under which this technology evolved. Baran and Davies versions of packet-switching had technical similarities but their conceptions of what they could be used for were entirely different. (Abbate, 8)