Internet innovator Paul Baran dies

ONE OF THE MEN behind the Internet, Paul Baran has died at the age of 84.

Baran's work for the Rand Corporation in the 1960s as part of military research for the Cold War resulted in Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet.

Baran came up with the idea of splitting data being sent over communications networks into chunks, or "message blocks", which would offset traffic surges and help protect the network from attack. The science network, Arpanet, was later based upon this approach.

That idea was further developed by a British scientist, Donald Davies, and the result was what we now call packet switching, a vital technical concept that underlies what we call the Internet.

It wasn't just this technology that Baran dreamed up, however, as his son, David, highlighted a 1966 paper that his father had written, which speculated that by the year 2000 people would be using online networks for news and shopping, according to the BBC.

The push for packet switching technology came from the growing fear of nuclear war. There was a pressing need for communications networks to remain in operation even if large parts of them were taken down in a nuclear attack.

Luckily for the world nuclear war did not happen, but the efforts made during those difficult times have resulted in what is considered by many to be the greatest of modern inventions, the Internet. µ