Saw a show on the history channel about how ARPA sponsored research into what became the Internet. They showed the first "packet" switch at UCLA which was cool. The show stated that the ARPA project was to get computers to communication easily as they were islands of independent processing. But I thought there was synchronous serial communications between computers well before this and that the main ARPA goal was to develop a communication network that could withstand a nuclear attack by re-routing packets around damaged switching nodes?
Dan