Vendor lineage
MITRE - the not-for-profit that sits between buyer and vendor
An organisation with no product to sell, advising the customer who is buying everybody else's.
MITRE operates federally funded research and development centres, which is an unusual commercial shape: it advises government on technical procurement without competing for the work it evaluates. In a period when the largest single buyer of computer communications was the United States government, that position made it structurally important to how the field developed.
The value of a body with no product is that its advice can be wrong without being self-serving. A vendor's architecture recommendation is inseparable from its catalogue; an integrator's is inseparable from what it can staff. Somebody has to be able to say a requirement is badly specified.
It belongs in this timeline for the same reason the standards laboratories do: several of the decisions that shaped what could be bought were made in rooms where no vendor was selling anything.