How DARPA Invented the web [Book Excerpt]

DARPA is an agency you’ve never heard of that funds programs you’ve only ever dreamed of. In this week’s excerpt, Michael Belfiore uncovers the history of this enigmatic government entity and reveals the incredible technologies it develops.

A former NASA program manager named Bob Taylor rose during the ranks of IPTO program managers to become the office’s third director in 1966. He later described the time-sharing setup at his disposal. ” In my office within the Pentagon, I had one terminal that connected to a time-sharing system at U.C. Berkeley. I had one who connected to a time-sharing system at the System Development Corporation, in Santa Monica. There was another terminal that connected to the Rand Corporation.” Taylor could interact, long-distance, with any individual of those computers in the course of the remote terminals in his office.

He himself saw the restrictions of interacting at a distance with a computer, however, and the year he took over IPTO, he got the agency to spring for a brand-new SDS 940, the first computer designed expressly for time sharing, for Engelbart’s group at SRI. Even before then, Engelbart and his team have been at work building monitors (most computer output in those days came through Teletypes and punch cards), input devices, and software to allow users to engage with computers as never before. But the most recent computer, along side ongoing support from ARPA, NASA, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, allowed them to rocket to a complete new level, culminating in a system they called simply the oN-Line System, or NLS. It was the precursor of almost every aspect of what we know today as the non-public computer.

By December 1968, Engelbart and his team at SRI were able to reveal the fruits of their labor to the remainder of the area for the first time. The occasion was the Fall Joint Computer Conference at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, and the place was filled with, by one account, two thousand to a few thousand computer researchers. The event would go down in computer lore as the mum of All Demos, and it should forever change the direction of computer hardware and software development-though a number of the concepts Engelbart introduced would take decades to return into their own.

In a staid, matter-of-fact delivery that made it all seem so inevitable, Engelbart proceeded to demonstrate for the first time, from his seat at a workstation whose display was projected overhead for all to work out (itself no easy feat-he’d had to borrow the best projector on the West Coast capable of projecting a video image from NASA), word processing, video chat (with colleagues at their own workstations back at SRI forty miles down the coast), real-time collaborative document editing, hypertext links that connected key terms to relevant supplemental material, and, among all of the rest, the computer mouse. ” I don’t know why we call it a mouse,” Engelbart monotoned. ” Sometimes I apologize. It started that way, and we never did change it.” To claim that the demo was a tour de force was a real understatement. In a worldwide of punch cards, Teletypes, and batch processing, and by which computers were anything but personal, the debut of the concepts behind today’s personal computers blew the minds of Engelbart’s audience. At the realization of the demo, they erupted to their feet in a standing ovation. ” I looked up,” Engelbart later recalled with wonder, ” and everyone was standing, cheering like crazy.” One conference attendee later described the demo as hands down essentially the most astounding event he’d ever witnessed. Another topped that by saying that it not only altered his concept for what computers could do for folk, but in addition changed his life.

Surely missed by most within the audience at the demonstration, amid the complete astonishing innovations, was a quick mention of a new project, ” this ARPA computer network-experimental network that’s going to return into being in its first form in about a year and grow to be sometime later with some twenty experimental computers in a network.” Little did Engelbart’s audiences know that that experimental computer network would grow to be just as world changing as anything they’d just witnessed.

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ADVANCES IN POWER generation might join past DARPA projects corresponding to the ARPANET in forever changing the style we live and work. But we must never take these and other marvels with no consideration. They need to be conceived and developed by dedicated managers, scientists, engineers, and other visionaries. Visionaries similar to those working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. One program manager described DARPA to me as a national treasure, and I are inclined to agree. However, I think it should stay that way only if, at the side of giving the agency its due, we also practice the benign neglect that it requires to thrive.

DARPA was conceived and has operated, at the beginning, as an agent of change for the u. s. armed ser vices, and I feel it can stay that way. Its mission to equip our nation’s war fighters with a technological edge over their adversaries gives DARPA a razor-sharp focus it might otherwise lack, and its emphasis on quickly moving projects from concept to working prototype while making as efficient use of funds as possible must be a model for research and development within the Department of Defense.

Even more than that, DARPA must also be a model for research and development through the federal government. It has proven repeatedly that true innovation don’t need to depend upon massive expenditures and armies of bureaucrats. Operating on one half of 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget, with a staff housed in a single office building of modest size, DARPA has fostered many of the most precious technological innovations of all time. Key to its success-besides its minimal bureaucracy-has been the term limits for its managers and its low overhead. The term limits make certain that the folk who do its most vital work care more about fulfilling the agency’s mission than protecting their jobs. The decision made at the outset that the agency shouldn’t maintain its own laboratories but instead farm out work to other organizations has allowed it to consistently stay just before the technological curve by quickly developing new capabilities and letting others go as it’s worthwhile to. Managers of any new government agency looking to capitalize on DARPA’s recipe for fulfillment-as an example, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA–E, funded under the Obama administration in 2009-would do well to keep in mind these essential ingredients.
Here’s to the subsequent fifty years.

Michael Belfiore has been an entire-time writer since 1995. He has covered the launch of the first privately built spaceship for the most recent York Post and Reuters as a freelance journalist and has written about space flight and advanced technology for Popular Science, New Scientist, Wired.com, Air & Space, Financial Times, and others. Along with his work as a journalist, Michael provides marketing and public relations writing services together with his wife, Wendy Kagan. They live in Woodstock, Big Apple with their daughters Amelie and Jade.

The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the web to Artificial Limbs is obtainable from Amazon .

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