What Kind of Paradise

What Kind of Paradise provides a fairly accurate account of the internet’s development from a government communication-sharing tool during the 1960s into the global platform that it has become today. Each of the novel’s key characters helps the author explore the impact of computer and internet technology.

Early computer science focused in part on the exploration of neural networks (information-processing networks in the human brain) as a model for how computers might be developed that could share information with one another. The earliest precursor to today’s internet was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Developed by the US government during the Cold War in the 1960s, ARPANET was seen as a way to disseminate information in the wake of a potential nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

While various communication networks were developed during the latter part of the 1960s and 1970s, 1983 is typically considered the official start date of the internet as we know it today. January 1, 1983, marked the implementation of a new communications protocol called the Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This new protocol allowed different kinds of computers on different kinds of networks to “talk” to one another. Even ARPANET switched over to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983.