Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), , also called (1958–72 and 1993–96) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), U.S. government agency created in 1958 to facilitate research in technology with potential military applications. Most of DARPA’s projects are classified secrets, but many of its military innovations have had great influence in the civilian world, particularly in the areas of electronics, telecommunications, and computer science. It is perhaps best known for ARPANET, an early network of time-sharing computers that formed the basis of the Internet.
DARPA owes its creation to the October 1957 launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, which many Americans viewed as a technological achievement as unexpected and challenging as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Among other countermeasures, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created DARPA to sort out and organize competing American missile and space projects and to delineate boundaries separating military from civilian space research. By 1960 DARPA had accomplished this first goal by transferring all civilian space programs to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and military space programs to the various branches of the U.S. armed forces.
Subsequently DARPA went on to direct research on antiballistic missiles, nuclear-test detection, radar, high-energy beams, computer science, and advanced materials. Among other innovations, DARPA projects have included the “stealth” compounds that have rendered certain U.S. aircraft (F-22 fighters and B-2 bombers) “invisible” to enemy radar, as well as new battlefield sensors, blue-green lasers, nonacoustic forms of submarine detection, computer graphics for virtual reality simulations, and nanotechnology. In the post-Cold War era, DARPA has played a key role in developing the information technology behind the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA)—put simply, the substitution of high technology and precision munitions for troops.
Unlike other Department of Defense organizations, DARPA does not have its own laboratories or research facilities, and it maintains only a skeletal bureaucracy. Instead of hiring a large, permanent staff, DARPA awards short contracts (typically three to five years) to eminent scientists to direct research as project managers. These project managers, in turn, are given significant freedom to fund research that they believe will benefit the military. Typically, project managers use their expertise and research contacts to form a project team with members located at various American universities and corporations. In particular, DARPA is renowned for funding “revolutionary” ideas, in line with DARPA’s overall strategy of making high-risk, high-return investments. For example, DARPA’s third director, Jack Ruina (1961–63), recognized that the problem of command, control, and communication of the nation’s military forces was one that computer technology might affect. Thus, in 1962 Ruina oversaw the creation of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) under the direction of Joseph Licklider, a former psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who was active in the emerging field of human-computer interactions. As head of IPTO from 1962 to 1964, Licklider initiated three of the most important developments in information technology: the creation of computer science departments at several major universities, time-sharing, and networking.
Computers in the 1950s were room-sized and extremely expensive to build and operate. Because computer time was so costly, researchers had to schedule limited access time. Any mistakes, typographical or programmatic, in a user’s input (punch cards) would necessitate a long wait for the next available slot in the computer’s sequential schedule. And, because so much computer time was spent inputting data and printing results, the processing power of the computer was often idle. Time-sharing was developed to use computer resources more efficiently by allowing multiple programs to run “simultaneously.” In reality, the computer’s central processing unit (CPU) switched rapidly from user to user while waiting for input or while printing results. This meant that users interacted directly with the computer, typing commands and hitting the “enter” key when ready, at which time all of the computer’s processing power appeared to be focused on their program. For Licklider, time-sharing was a problem in communication as well as computing, and he funded time-sharing and networking research at MIT (Project MAC), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of California, Berkeley. Licklider’s goal was not simply to develop time-sharing but also to develop a community of researchers who would make the new machine a central part of their investigations. It was a standard goal of IPTO and DARPA managers to investigate technology of military usefulness, but a longer-term goal was to create a community of researchers who could develop and continually reimagine a particular technology with a common set of standards and practices.
Time-sharing allowed for the creation of local area networks, but serious technical limitations soon became apparent. Beyond a certain point, adding more users slowed the system so much that it became unresponsive, or seemingly “asleep.” The solution was to find a way to network various local time-sharing networks together so that computational resources could be shared. In 1966 IPTO funded the creation of a high-speed network among the universities and corporations it had contracted. This was the beginning of the ARPANET.
ARPANET was more than a predecessor to the Internet. It was the common technological context in which an entire generation of computer scientists came of age. It differed from existing computer networks in two distinct ways. First, rather than sharing a single computer among a host of terminals (as in time-sharing), ARPANET connected a network of time-sharing computers. Second, this network used the new and unproven technology of packet switching. Before this, networks were hardwired together, much like the telephone system in which individuals are connected by specific dedicated circuits. Packet switching worked more like a postal system; that is, messages had a designated destination and return address but no mandatory delivery route. Another way to think of packet switching is that in such a network the intelligence necessary to move a message is decentralized and spread throughout the system. Such a system was of great interest to the military, since it could operate and route messages even if part of the network was destroyed.
By the time Robert Kahn became IPTO director in 1979, the Department of Defense had multiple incompatible packet-switching networks. Kahn forged the Internet from these disparate systems through the creation of the famous Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a process involving industry, academia, and the armed services. Once again DARPA hired individuals well versed in specific fields and gave them the ability to let contracts to institutions capable of doing the research and creating the final product. Of course, not even DARPA could have foreseen what the Internet would become.