What Baran envisioned was a network of unmanned switches, or nodes—stand-alone computers, essentially—that routed messages by employing what he called a “self-learning policy at each node, without need for a central, and possibly vulnerable, control point.” He came up with a scheme for sending information back and forth that he called “hot potato routing,” which was essentially a rapid store-and-forward system working almost instantaneously, in contrast with the old post-it-and-forward teletype procedure.
