ARPA (DARPA)
The single most influential agency in the history of computer development in the United States is the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA is the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense. Established in February 1958 by President Eisenhower, and subsequently backed by the Kennedy Administration, ARPA's institution was in direct response to the launching of "Sputnik" by the former U.S.S.R.
The sobering recognition that the Soviet Union had acquired the capacity to successfully launch orbiting earth satellites and thereby tap the domains of space for scientific and military designs stunned the U.S. defense community and bore the potential for intensified cold war tensions. ARPA's mission was to produce creative, innovative, and often high risk research ideas providing meaningful technological impact that went far beyond the convention evolutionary developmental approaches, and to act on these ideas through to demonstrations of technical feasibility and development of prototype systems.
In 1960, all of ARPA's civilian space programs were reassigned to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the military space programs were transferred to their respective service (Air Force, Navy, etc.) This was a means of focusing the U.S. Space Program on precise objectives, while keeping ARPA concentrated in its principal charter, which was funding research. ARPA became the largest financial backing agency for technical research and development. Within ARPA, a special office was established to support research covering the field of computers and computer related technologies. This was the Information Processing Techniques Office, or "IPTO." In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider, a professor of Psychology at MIT, was hired by ARPA to become first Director of the IPTO. Licklider was an intelligent visionary and innovator in the field of human-computer interaction and specifically the field of interactive computing.
Licklider argued that to make computers more useful, they also had to become more accessible and responsive to humans. One of Licklider's goals included the creation and financial backing of various research projects exploring time sharing. The concept of time sharing would permit multiple persons to share the high speed central processing power of a computer, thereby increasing the number of "concurrent" users the computer could serve. Licklider was the designer of an early time sharing project known as "Project MAC" (Machine Aided Cognition) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By 1963, Project MAC had implemented time sharing on an IBM 7094 computer, permitting it to accommodate 24 simultaneous users.
In the late 1960s, ARPA redefined its function and focused on a diverse set of relatively small, fundamentally exploratory research programs. The Agency was renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1972, and in the early 1970s, it emphasized direct energy programs, information processing, and tactical technologies. In the area of information processing, DARPA made great advances, at first through its support of the evolution of time-sharing, and later through the development of the ARPANET (the first wide-area packet switching network), Packet Radio Network, Packet Satellite Network and finally, the Internet and research in the artificial intelligence (AI) fields of speech recognition and signal processing. DARPA also funded the development of the Douglas Engelbart's NLS computer system and the Aspen Movie Map, which was likely the first hypermedia system and a significant precursor of virtual reality.
The disputed Mansfield Amendment of 1973 explicitly restricted appropriations for defense research (through ARPA/DARPA) to projects with direct military application. Some argue that the amendment destroyed American science, since ARPA/DARPA was a major funding source for essential science projects at the time; the National Science Foundation never absorbed the slack as anticipated. But the consequent brain drain is also credited with advancing the growth of the fledgling personal computer industry. A lot of young computer scientists fled from the universities to startup Internet Providers and private research labs like Xerox PARC.
From 1976-1981, DARPA's major drives were commanded by air, land, sea, and space technology; During the 1980s, the attention of the Agency was focused on information processing and aircraft-related programs, including the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) or Hypersonic Research Program. The Strategic Computing Program enabled DARPA to tap advanced processing and networking technologies and to reconstruct and fortify relationships with universities after the Vietnam War.
DARPA is autonomous from other more traditional military R&D and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management. DARPA has approximately 240 personnel directly managing a $3.2 billion budget and focuses on short-term (two to four-year) projects operated by small, purpose-built teams. Today, DARPA’s mission is still to prevent technological surprise to the US, but also to produce technological surprise for our enemies.