Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 14. N

Napster

See “Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks”

National Air and Space Administration (NASA)

See “Assange, Julian”, “Augmented and virtual reality”, “DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)”, “Fairchild Semiconductor”, “Hidden Figures (2017 film)”

National Security Agency (NSA)

See “Assange, Julian”, “Carr, Iris”, “Hellman, Martin”, “Snowden, Edward”, “WikiLeaks”

Networking

Computer networking is all about connecting multiple computers so they can share data with each other. The largest computer network in the world is the internet. There are also lots of much smaller computer networks.

In the early years of the Cold War (the late 1950s), a time when the most robust communications network was the telephone system, DARPA (then just ARPA) asked the RAND Corporation to help develop a communications network that could withstand nuclear warfare. Paul Baran led that project.

Meanwhile, at the National Physical Laboratory in England, Donald Davies was researching how to improve computer timesharing systems. The fixed bandwidth of existing telephone networks wouldn’t cut it. In the mid-1960s, Baran and Davies concurrently invented the concept of packet switching. ARPAA chief scientist Lawrence Roberts collaborated with Baran and Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA to create a distributed computer network based on it.

In October 1965, Lawrence Roberts made the very first data transmission to another computer far away: from an MIT computer in Massachusetts to a Q32 computer ...