larly well was break down. Every button pushed set
in motion a squad of technicians who, when they
weren't repairing them, were tearing their hair out
over them. A building full of computers was required
to process the information that sent Apollo 11's
three-man crew to the moon.

Robert Taylor and Joseph C. R. Licklider, two
computer scientists from UCLA, during the mid-
1960s, came up with the idea that computers would
one day cease to be closed circuits and would com-
municate with one another. Shortly thereafter they
put their theory into practice. On November 21,
1969, computers at UC Santa Barbara, the Stanford
Research Institute, and the University of Utah were
all linked at UCLA, and a message was sent from one
computer to another within the network.

The Pentagon, which did not hesitate to finance
the program from 1966 forward, still had to figure
out how to put into practice something that was
barely an idea—the linking of remote computers so
that they could communicate with each other. In
their book on the birth of the Internet, Katie Hafner
and Matthew Lyon report a rumor that circulated
during the era: the network was being designed to
withstand a nuclear Armageddon. Were such a des-
perate situation to arise, the network would need to
continue to function, however many Soviet war‐
heads might detonate on American soil. ² They need-
ed to devise "nodes" through which the messages,
now divided into "packets"—fragments or bits of the
original message—would pass, each of which would
follow a different route to the same destination. A
nuclear explosion that might destroy various nodes
would not wipe out the entire web; therefore the

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