RAND

The RAND Corporation was founded in 1946 in Santa Monica, California by engineers and military who worked together in World War II. RAND is often called a “think-tank”. Until 1948 project RAND was under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, later it became an independent non-profit organisation. The acronym stands for Research ANd Development.
For almost 60 years RAND has been analysing and dealing with the most different private and public contemporary needs of the Americans, including social or economic areas like education, poverty, crime and environment as well as national security issues.
After the so called “Sputnik Shock” RAND – at the Air Force’s urging – dealt with the development of a communication network, that could survive a possible nuclear attack from the Soviets. In 1964RAND researcher Paul Baran set the cornerstone for the technologie used for data transfer on the internet with his work on packet-switching networks called „On Distributed Communications Networks”.

Until this day data is being split up in “packets” and sent separately after this principle. About the same time his (then-unknown) colleague Donald Davies from NPL had similar thoughts and worked out the idea of sending information by splitting them into packets. Three years earlier MIT professor Leonard Kleinrock composed the theory of packet-switching ("Information Flow in Large Communication Nets") for the first time.
The book „A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates“ published by RAND in 1955, which basically consists of randomly generated numbers is probably the best known RAND publication. These representative random numbers are still being used by statisticians, physicists and market analysts to perform all kinds of calculations, since it’s still the largest book of its kind.
Today about one fourth of RAND research is dealing with national security issues.