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From Sputnik to the WWW, a History of ARPA

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the know-your-roots-boy dept.

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."

8 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Same thing is happening everywhere by downix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Same thing is happening everywhere by samkass · · Score: 4, Informative
      Our politicans have surrendered the long term, instead looking for the quick fix.

      Except that they haven't. The DARPA spokesman in the article is right, and the "horizon" for DARPA (and CERDEC) programs are at LEAST 4-5 years out. In fact, some might argue that DARPA spends *TOO MUCH* money these days on pie-in-the-sky research and not enough on things that will directly benefit warfighters or civilians. Perhaps some particular program director is hard-nosed about this stuff, but it's certainly not true of DARPA in general.

      Just peruse the list of some of the stuff DARPA is funding for proof of the long horizon:

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      E pluribus unum
  2. DARPA ain't what it used to be by Phaid · · Score: 3, Funny

    Any more, it reminds me of the great quote from Ghostbusters where Ray tells Venkman: "You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

  3. Reality not always fun by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Table-ized A.I.
  4. Don't "blame Congress" for Bell Labs by dpbsmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Don't "blame Congress" for Bell Labs by tjstork · · Score: 4, Informative

      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."

      Actually, as a point of historical fact, "German scientists" really didn't do all -that much- in the space race. Within the USA, Von Braun's Jupiter - C and Redstone were both ultimately failures as the ICBMs they were intended to be, soon supplanted by the solid fueled Minuteman. It was Convairs "Atlas" booster that delivered the first Americans into orbit. From there, really, he did some good work on the Saturn V, and it did get us to the moon, but, the really hard parts about the moon were the lunar orbit rendevous, the lander, and the apollo spacecraft itself, and all of those were done by American contracting companies.

      On the Soviet side, the space race had scarcely no German help. It was Korolev that was the brain child of all of the early Soviet successes. Had he not died on the table during what should have been a routine operation, it is very likely the Soviets might have finished their own massive N-1, and, while they wouldn't have necessarly been able to put a man on the moon, they could have done some interesting things with it.

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    2. Re:Don't "blame Congress" for Bell Labs by tjstork · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

      It's not hostility to immigration. It's illegal immigration. I think you would find that a lot of right wingers on the forefront of the illegal immigration charge have a lot of H1-B employees with engineering degrees wondering why they have to jump through so many hoops to be a citizen when evidentally a bunch of illiterate crop pickers get to be citizens after sneaking across the border.

      I do recall that Bush's immigration bill would have raised the H1-B limit, AND, changed the requirements for legal entry to be stacked more along an educational and professional background, rather than, how poor an immigrant is, or how much family there is, as is the case today.

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  5. DARPA's OK, but private sector research is dead by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    DARPA is doing OK; they've been getting results. I've dealt with DARPA on and off since the 1980s, and I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. That was something that needed doing. DARPA had been funding robotics research since the 1960s without much to show for it that DoD could actually use.

    The academic AI community needed some serious butt-kicking. CMU had been working on automatic driving since the 1980s, with very slow progress. Stanford AI had totally tanked. MIT AI was off on the behavior-based robots tangent, which had peaked in the early 1990s. Some of the old guys had to be shoved aside to get things moving again. That's now happened.

    In the private sector, though, computer science research is almost dead. Google is focused on applications; they do a little theory, but not much. Microsoft did some good work; their big contribution was moving Bayesian statistics into the mainstream, something for which Bill Gates was directly responsible. Beyond that, there's not much. The DEC research centers are gone; HP Labs barely exists, PARC was dumped by Xerox and isn't doing much, Bell Labs is barely alive, and IBM Almaden was severely downsized. (I happened to be visiting IBM Almaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was like a funeral.) Apple does little basic research any more. Sony SCEA diverted most of their research talent into dealing with the horrors of the PS3 programming problem.

    Smart people aren't going into research any more. They go into startups. Or finance. The two best people on our DARPA Grand Challenge team went to hedge funds, where they did very well financially.