Nineteen sixty-two. In the same year as the Cuban missile crisis, the United States Air Force launched a research collaboration with the Rand Corporation designed to provide a reliable system of communication in the case of an enemy attack on North America. Drawing on research at MIT and elsewhere, Rand engineer Paul Baran proposed a packet-switching network that would enable the rapid rerouting of data throughout a decentralized communications system. Baran's instructions were to ensure "minimum essential communications" and thus guarantee "second strike" capability; he proposed an even more robust system allowing contact among as many as a hundred networked computers. Baran's proposal was an important landmark in the Internet's prehistory.

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