Thursday, November 27, 2008

Missiles and communications

In the year of my birth, 1957, the Defense Department formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to coordinate science and technology projects with military applications. In 1962 the RAND Corporation was asked to propose a means whereby command and control could be maintained after a nuclear strike. Communications networks was either centralized through a hub or decentralized with a number of hubs where switchboards served as the hubs, which was highly vulnerable to a nuclear strike. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles made wars between Great Powers irrational because they were not winnable but twice caused a deep fear, first during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and then the Yom Kippur War of 1973. From 1976 to 1982, I was involved with Fleet Ballistic Missile submarines as a launcher operator supervisor onboard the USS Robert E Lee, SSBN 601 Polaris and the USS Daniel Webster, SSBN 626 Poseidon. From 1988 until 1998 I was an electrical engineer employed by TRW supporting the MX, Peacekeeper, and Minuteman ICBM weapon systems. A web of computers called ARPANET was established in 1968 with a total of four computers connected to it by phone lines, three in California and one at the University of Utah. APRA used RAND proposal of a distributed network with no central hubs but nodes that could be wiped out but other nodes still be able to deliver the signal. In 1971 Intel produced the first commercial microprocessor. In 1972 the first e-mail program was designed. In 1973 the TCP/IP protocol was designed. In 1974 the TCP/IP designers called it the Internet. In 1983 while I was an engineering student at the University of Utah, 563 computers were on the net when the University of Wisconsin developed the Domain Name System (DNS) that let any one computer find another. The geosynchronous satellites of the late 1960s made the world a global village. Overseas phone calls (OPC) numbered about a million in the 1950s and grew to 23 million by 1970. In 1980 there were 200 million OPC with other political and economic consequences, including a unified market trading a trillion dollars daily in major world currencies on average. An international communications cost collapse allowed the world’s financial market to become integrated to function full time as a seamless market. For the first time, he free market could dictate policy of a nation via the international consequences. By 1990, three hundred thousand computers were connected on the Internet. In 1992, the European nuclear research consortium, CERN, released a web browser, the World Wide Web (www) and the greatest decade of wealth creation in the history of the world began. Primvest provided $5M in venture capital to OnSat where I was employed as the Vice President of Business development, which allowed us to provide Internet connectivity to the Navajo Nations via geosynchronous satellites. I was also acting as a Director with RMWT Telecom. Costs plummeted with the overdevelopment of this time but it allowed growth where 6.3 billion overseas phone calls were being made by 2001. In March of 2000, the bubble begins to burst and by March of 2001 there was a recession in place. On September 11, 2001, there was an attack on the financial capital of the empire of wealth.