Paul Baran was a pioneer in the development of computer networks creating one of the core concepts of the internet, packet switched computer networking. In the 1960s, Paul Baran, one of the founding fathers of the internet as a researcher at RAND, developed the concept of packet switching as an integral part of the new technology that would become the internet.

One of the key differences between communications before the internet, to the way information flowed with the new standards known as Internet Protocol, is the concept of packet switching. Throughout the standard for Internet Protocol you will see the description of packet switching, “fragment and reassemble internet datagrams when necessary for transmission through small packet networks.” A message is divided into smaller parts know as packets before they are sent. Each packet is transmitted individually and can even follow different routes to its destination. Once all the packets forming a message arrive at the destination, they are recompiled into the original message.

After joining the RAND Corporation in 1959, Baran took on the task of designing a “survivable” communications system that could maintain communication between end points in the face of damage from nuclear weapons. RAND was a think tank that focused mostly on cold war related military issues, and was looking for communications systems that would survive a nuclear attack. An article on the RAND website, “Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet,” states that Paul Baran offered a solution “to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.” It is often debated as whether RAND's view was the primary goal of the ARPANET.

Baran's concept of packet switching was part of this work, as it allowed for a system that could route traffic around an area if there was a problem, packets would simply be routed around it.

In 1969, when the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started developing the idea of an inter-networked set of terminals to share computing resources, the reference materials which they considered included Baran and the RAND Corporation's “On Distributed Communications.”

The RAND name originated as a contraction of Research and Development. RAND continues to operate today as a nonprofit research and analysis institution across a broad range of subjects.

Several years before the ARPANET was created, Paul Baran had two ideas that became very important in the development of the ARPANET. The first was the idea of building a distributed network. The second was a technique for data transmission that later came to be called packet switching.

In 1959 RAND s reputation for intellectual freedom induced a young engineer named Paul Baran to leave Hughes Aircraft and pursue his interests at RAND. Even before arriving at RAND, Baran had been thinking about the concepts of redundancy and rerouting that were put forth in the neurobiologist Warren McCulloch s work on neural nets.

While it is debated in some circles as whether RAND's view was the primary goal of the internet, RAND was a think tank that focused mostly on cold war related military issues, and was looking for communications systems that would survive a nuclear attack. In the 1960s, Paul Baran, one of the founding fathers of the internet as a researcher at RAND, developed the concept of packet switching as an integral part of the new technology that would become the internet. Baran's concept of packet switching was part of this work, as it allowed for a system that could route traffic around an area if there was a problem, packets would simply be routed around it.

Paul Baran, one of the Rand thinkers on the project, conceived the idea for a new kind of communications network; one that wasn't organized point-to-point, but instead was set up more like a fishnet.

People at the RAND Corporation, America's foremost military think tank, were trying to figure out an important strategic problem: how could US authorities talk to each other in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.

The idea was to create a decentralized computer network, whereby every computer was connected to each other. In this case, even if one of the systems was hit, the others would remain unaffected. Computers in the 1960's were very large and very expensive. This new proposed network would also solve another problem, allowing various agencies and locations the ability to use computers in other locations.

The RAND Corporation was founded after the second world war as a research agency for the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently incorporated as a non-profit organization with a its main office in Santa Monica, California. The name RAND is a contraction of “Research and Development.”

Paul Baran discribed the process of packet switching. In 1964 Paul Baran working for RAND wrote “On Distributed Communications Networks” which described packet switching networks with no single outage point.

While at RAND, Baran became interested in the survivability of communication networks in the event of a nuclear attack.

The 1960s the Internet is conceived.