Having concluded that AT&T’s long distance system was vulnerable to a Soviet strike, Baran came up with an ingenious means to harden the system. The idea was to try to turn the telephone infrastructure, a point-to-point system, into a highly redundant network—that is, one with various paths between any two points, so that if one route were taken out, the others would survive.† Baran’s inspiration was the human brain, which can sometimes recover from damage by reassigning lost functions to neural paths still intact. In order for his approach to work, Baran envisioned breaking up every message
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