"When it was first designed it was supposed to be resilient, proof against chunks of infrastructure being taken out in a nuclear attack."
Oft repeated, but simply not true. The networks that were designed to survive nuclear attack included the "Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network", or MEECN, and the prior "Survivable Low Frequency Communications System" or SLFCS, Besides, if you use an ounce of common sense, it only stands to reason ... no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable, and the Internet was not then, and still isn't, securable.
In The Beginning, the first two nodes of what became TehIntraWebTubes were at SRI and UCLA, conceived, designed, implemented and run by students and professors. With no Pentagon oversight, input or anything else "intellectual". Money, yes. Oversight, no.
Boiling it down to basics, the (D)ARPANET was just a research network designed to research networking. The "survives nukes" myth came about much later ... The only reason it was built to be resilient is because the existing hardware was really, really flaky.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
