Packets

In Baran's network scheme, transmissions would be broken up into packets, each of which might travel a completely different route to the destination, where they would then be reassembled into the original transmission. Thus, this vision of a distributed network was also called a packet-switching network.

However, no one had ever built a distributed, packet-switching network before. Network experts for the telephone company at Bell Laboratories predicted such a network would never work. Still, the researchers at IPTO were going to try to realize Paul Baran's idea...

This chapter was written by Jeff Nyhoff and Joel Adams. Copy editing by Nancy Zylstra
©2005 Calvin University (formerly Calvin College), All Rights Reserved

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