Arpanet

Roots of a Network

ARPANET was an end-product of a decade of computer-communications developments spurred by military concerns that the Soviets might use their jet bombers to launch surprise nuclear attacks against the United States. By the 1960s, a system called SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) was already built, using computers to track incoming enemy aircraft and to coordinate military response. The system included 23 “direction centers,” each with a massive mainframe computer that could track 400 planes, distinguishing friendly aircraft from enemy bombers. The system required six years and $61 billion to implement.

The system's name hints at its importance, as author John Naughton points out. The system was only “semi-automatic,” so human interaction was pivotal. For J. C. R. Licklider, the man who would become the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), the SAGE network demonstrated above all else the enormous power of interactive computing—or, as he would later refer to it in a seminal 1960 essay, of “man-computer symbiosis.” In his essay, one of the most important in the history of computing, Licklider posited the then-radical belief that a marriage of the human mind with the computer would eventually result in better decision-making.

In 1962, Licklider left a post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to join ARPA. According to Naughton, his brief two-year stint at the organization seeded everything that was to follow. His tenure signaled the demilitarization of ARPA; it was Licklider who changed the name of his office from Command and Control Research to IPTO. “Lick,” as he insisted on being called, brought to the project an emphasis on interactive computing, and the prevalent utopian conviction that humans teamed with computers could create a better world.

Perhaps in part because of Cold War fears, by the mid-1960s the Defense Department's ARPA arm had become, in author Ronda Hauben's words, the “sugar daddy” of computer science. During Licklider's IPTO tenure, it is estimated that 70 percent of all U.S. computer-science research was funded by ARPA. But many of those involved say the agency was far from being a restrictive militaristic environment, giving them free reign to try out radical ideas. As a result, ARPA was the birthplace not only of computer networks and the Internet, but also of computer graphics, parallel processing, computer-flight simulation, and other key achievements.

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