From Sputnik to the WWW, a History of ARPA

Ian Lamont writes "Next month is the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, but it's not just the start of mankind's exploration of space that should be observed. The 'October surprise' also changed computing forever, thanks to the subsequent creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA, catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet ... and even an early 'electronic office.' However, the long-range vision that Licklider promoted at the agency is allegedly in danger, according to some observers quoted in the article: 'In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence — take five years and see what happens,' [CMU Professor David Farber] says. 'Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, "Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field." Now that's changed. It's more driven by, "What did you do for us this year?"' Former ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld blames Congress and a new crop of 'wishy-washy' agency heads. DARPA's response: It still is investing heavily in technologies that may take years to come to market, such as universal language translation, realistic agent-based societal simulation environments, and photonic communications in a microprocessor having a theoretical maximum performance of 10 TFLOPS."

Comments

Same thing is happening everywhere

[downix]

Our politicans have surrendered the long term, instead looking for the quick fix. The US economy is now based on "pass the bag", flipping stocks to the next buyer. But what happens to those at the end of the chain.

And who is there to blame? Ourselves, the voters within the US. We vote based on short-term memories. We vote not on who would do the job best, but by who slings the most mud. We ignore qualifications for image. Politicians are out on a JOB INTERVIEW! The voters are the managers deciding on who to fill in the position. Take it as seriously as if you were hiring the nurse to administer your parents medication, because truth is, you are.

Reality not always fun

[Tablizer]

Our politicans have surrendered the long term, instead looking for the quick fix. The US economy is now based on "pass the bag", flipping stocks to the next buyer. But what happens to those at the end of the chain.

I don't know if that's the case. Wheeling and dealing seems to be where the money is, for good or bad. Perhaps we are biased as geeks and wish that brains paid better. Everybody wants their specialty/hobby to be more important than it really is. (Most countries reject heavy wheeling and dealing culture because they feel it "ugly" and demeaning.)

Our schools may be deluding the population into believing that calculus is an economic savior when it fact it is as outdated as factory work because its cheaper to think overseas.

Don't "blame Congress" for Bell Labs

[dpbsmith]

As others have noted, the focus on short-term payoffs is not limited to DARPA but affects our whole society. The days when private corporations invested in basic research is gone.

Gone, too are the J. C. R. Lickliders and Vannevar Bushes and Jerome Wiesners who laid the foundations of our technical and scientific success. The President's Science Advisory Council vanished under Nixon. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished under Reagan. Science and engineering are no longer at the table when national policy is being decided.

And the current hostility toward immigration and the hoops that foreign grad students and postdocs have to jump through isn't helping, either.

Call the roll of the people who gave us our nuclear weapons. Sure, there were the Harold Ureys and E. O. Lawrences and Richard Feynmans, but a lot of it depended on foreign scientists escaping the European dictatorships. Postwar, the space race was a contest between "our German scientists and their German scientists."

And now we have an administration that is not only fostering science and engineering, it seems to have an active hostility toward it. Somewhat reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union when Lysenko came to the fore.

I think it's probably too late for the U. S. to maintain its present position of world leadership in science and technology. The conditions that nourished that leadership have been too absent for too long.