Paul Baran publishes "On Distributed Communications" Series
published in 1964

Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND Corporation, publishes "On Distributed Communications" Series. He was working on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a nuclear attack.

 

Baran suggested a distributed network–"a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack." This type of system would have no centralized switch. He also had the idea to divide messages into "message blocks" before sending them out across the network. Each block would be sent separately and rejoined into a whole when they were received at their destination. This concept later came to be known as packet-switching.