Parallel Communications
It is hard to say if the parallel communication was first
used for the bandwidth enhancement or for the fault-tolerance. For Cyrus Field
it took 12 years and four failed expeditions to lay the first transatlantic
cable. Cables were snapping and could not be recovered from the ocean floor. On
5 August 1858 a cable begun operating, but the glory was short-lived, the link
was dead by 18 September. Eight years later, on 13 July 1866, the Great
Eastern, by far the largest ship afloat, begun laying a new cable made in a
single piece of 2730 nautical miles long with a new insulating resin from the
gutta-percha tree found in
Figure 1. Loading the transatlantic cable into the 'Great Eastern' in 1865
The transatlantic cable station continued in operation until 1965 and it was still operational when in March 1964 a paper called “On Distributed Communications Networks” was published by Paul Baran, who was developing a communication method which could withstand a nuclear attack and enable transmissions of vital information across the country. Paul Baran concluded that extremely survivable networks can be built allowing parallel paths between the stations and that even moderated redundancy permits the withstanding of extremely heavy level attacks with negligible loss in communications. In 1965 Air Force approved testing of Baran’s theory and four years later on October 1st, 1969 the progenitor of the global Internet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the U.S. Department of Defense, was born.
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Figure 2. Diagrams from the report of
Paul Baran to |
Links related to the
first transatlantic cable:
- BBC - History - The 'Great Eastern' (cached)
- The Early Transatlantic Cable History (cached)
- IEEE History Center - Landing of the Transatlantic Cable, 1866 (cached)
- IEEE History Center-County Kerry Transatlantic Cable Stations, 1866 (cached)
- History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy - Great Eastern (cached)
- IEEEVM Building the Great Eastern (cached)
- Jules Verne Great Eastern Ephemera - Andrew Nash (cached)
- Photo Gallery - Laying Cable on Shore (cached)
- Gutta-Percha (cached)
Figures:
Figure 3. Laying Cable on Shore
Figure 4. On 13 July 1866, the Great
Eastern, a magnificent ship of its day left
Links related to
ARPANET:
- Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks, August 1965 (PDF 1.46 MB)
- Paul Baran, The Beginnings of Packet Switching: Some Underlying Concepts (PDF 421 KB)
- Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications Networks (PDF 0.98 MB)
- Paul Baran, On Survivability of Networks (PDF 245 KB)
- About RAND History Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet
- ARPANET - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (cached)
- Distributed network and packet-switching (cached)
- Inventor of the Week Archive (cached)
- Paul Baran (cached)
- Reading List for CMSC 711 Computer Networks Fall 2000 (cached)
- Short History of Packet Switching