Robert Taylor
lorenetworking
The research director who started the ARPANET in 1966 and then used his agency's budget leverage to conscript the man who built it.
He wanted Larry Roberts to run the project and Roberts declined. Taylor then established that the Defense Department supplied fifty-one per cent of Lincoln Lab's funding, and asked the agency's director to inform the lab's director that sending Roberts would be in everyone's interest. Roberts, by his own account not particularly eager, was at the Pentagon within months. The most consequential networking project of the century began with a program manager who did not want the job, which is worth remembering against every account of invention driven purely by enthusiasm. Taylor's stated objective was plainer than the later mythology: to let people separated geographically discover and exploit common interests.
Also known as: bob taylor, ipto, arpanet
Sources
- Robert Taylor, IPTO Director from June 1966 to March 1969, who joined because he had become heartily subscribed to the Licklider vision of interactive computing; on learning that the Defense Department provided 51 per cent of Lincoln Lab's funding he asked the ARPA director to tell the lab's director it was in their interests to send Larry Roberts, who was not particularly eager for the job and was at the Pentagon by January 1967
- Building on the ideas of Licklider, Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers, and appointed Roberts as program manager