Revisiting RAND’s Lost Monte Carlo Simulations: Sharla Perrine, Paul Baran, and the True Business Case for the Internet#

Trey Darley

• Why: The survivability math that justified building the Internet has never been re-run against today's centralized cloud topologies — a sharp question for anyone whose job is DC/WAN topology and resilience.
• What: A reintroduction of Sharla Perrine and Paul Baran's early-1960s Monte Carlo simulations (punched cards, octal assembly) that proved a distributed packet-switched network could survive attack — work later used to argue for ARPANET funding — plus a proposal to re-run the simulations under modern assumptions (traffic models, failure modes, time-synchronization shear effects in packet networks) to test whether resilience has quietly rotted as architectures centralized. (from abstract only)
• How: Historical reconstruction plus a proposed modern re-simulation using contemporary toolchains, comparing 1960s modeling assumptions with cloud-era reality.
• Where applicable: Conceptual / research-stage — a lightning talk proposing a research effort rather than presenting completed results; closer to the PM's core topology interests than a typical wildcard.