What role did Paul Baran play in the development of packet switching?

Paul Baran, an electrical engineer at the RAND Corporation, was a foundational figure in the development of packet switching, a technology that serves as a core pillar of the Internet.31

Tasked with designing a communications network capable of surviving a nuclear attack, Baran proposed a "distributed" network that lacked centralized switches or dedicated lines, ensuring functionality even if several nodes were disabled. To achieve this, he conceived of breaking large messages into smaller units—which he called "message blocks"—that could be transmitted independently across the network and reassembled at their destination. Baran referred to his routing process as "hot-potato routing," a design that utilized a "rapid store and forward" method to enable essentially real-time data transmission.123

Although his work, published in a series of studies between 1960 and 1962, initially received little attention, it was later rediscovered by ARPA and became a key technical foundation for ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet.312