How desirable and inevitable are large heterogeneous, distributed computer networks? In this article Professor Kirstein, whose group at University College London operates one node of the large international ARPA network, describes the motivation for setting up such networks and the problems which must be resolved before they are deployed more widely. Those problems are often more political and sociological than technical.
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Kirstein, P. Distributed computer networks. Nature 257, 549–554 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1038/257549a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/257549a0