Re: Wasn't the reason to create an "arpanet" to obtain redundand paths to reach a destination?
News to me ... I remember three links as early as '73 ... Rand/USC to the Pentagon, Stanford to Harvard, and Berkeley to MIT ... Each link made several stops along the way, and there were several mid-continent cross-connects. All three of the west coast schools were connected directly.
That said, in late 1977 I managed to take down all the PDP10 kit at Stanford and Berkeley with a software upgrade. Effectively split the West coast ARPANet in half for a couple hours. Not fun having bigwigs from Moffett and NASA Ames screaming because they couldn't talk to JPL and Lockheed without going through MIT ...