Conversation

Here's Paul Baran's RAND-published September 1962 justification for distributed communications networks summed up in a single chart. It's also the same paper where the famous "centralized vs decentralized vs distributed" triptych of graphs comes from. You still see this exact diagram, uncited, in modern presentations on the decentralized/distributed web.

Full paper: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P2626.pdf