DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

securitynetworkingops culture

The United States defence research agency created in 1958, and the funder of the network that became the internet.

Founded within months of Sputnik, on the reasoning that the United States had been strategically surprised and should not be again, with a mandate to fund research too speculative for anyone else. The structure is the interesting part and it is widely imitated and rarely reproduced: small permanent staff, programme managers hired on fixed terms of a few years, and a deliberate expectation that most programmes will fail. A manager arrives with a problem, funds work at universities and companies, and leaves - which means the agency cannot easily develop the institutional attachment to a failing programme that keeps ordinary funding bodies pouring money into things that are not working. The networking work matters here for a specific reason worth being precise about. DARPA did not invent packet switching; that was arrived at independently by Paul Baran at RAND and Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory in Britain, working on different problems. What DARPA did was fund the building of a working network at a scale that proved the idea, and then fund the protocols that let separate networks join. J.C.R. Licklider's role is worth knowing too: his 1960 paper on human-computer symbiosis and his memos to what he jokingly addressed as the Intergalactic Computer Network described interactive, networked computing years before there was hardware to do it, and he then held the budget that made people build it. The general point is that the agency's contribution was rarely the idea. It was the patience and the money to find out whether the idea worked, sustained across the decade that answering usually takes.

Also known as: arpa, advanced research projects agency, defense advanced research projects agency

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