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.
MITRE is a not-for-profit corporation that operates federally funded research centres, which is an unusual institutional form worth understanding: it works only for government sponsors, holds no commercial products, and exists partly so that technical judgement about systems can be bought without buying it from a bidder.
In networking its contribution is a system most people have never heard of. MITRENET was a broadband local network built on cable television plant, and it seeded a line of thinking that ran directly into industry - the Ford Aerospace team whose work traced back to MITRENET went on to found Sytek, which built its whole company on broadband and later supplied the technology behind IBM's PC LAN.
MITRE also worked alongside the National Bureau of Standards through the 1970s on local networking, and the workshop the two organisations ran in January 1979 sits immediately before the symposium and the wave of company formations that followed. That sequence is the fact worth recording: the entrepreneurs who founded the local networking industry in mid-1979 had spent the preceding months in rooms convened by a standards body and a federal research centre.
It is the least visible kind of contribution and one of the most consequential. Nothing MITRE built became a product, and the people who had been shown what was possible went on to build the products.
- Mitre Corporation (Wikipedia): founded 1958, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation operating federally funded research and development centers, with headquarters at Bedford, Massachusetts and McLean, Virginia
- History of Computer Communications - National Bureau of Standards and MITRE, 1971 to 1979, including the NBS and MITRE workshop of January 1979 that preceded the local networking symposium
- History of Computer Communications on the founding of Sytek: the Ford Aerospace team that became Sytek had built a CATV-based network with lineage to MITRENET, and presented at the MITRE and NBS symposium