FRIDAY SURPRISE: The Big Five-Oh

Friday, May 02, 2008 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Technology, History

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently turned 50. What's DARPA, you ask? Well, it is the agency that invented the network upon which you are reading this missive.

DARPA was founded to do fundamental, high-risk research into science and technology that could be used for military purposes. Today that sounds ominous and vaguely sinister, but in the 1950s it was exciting and patriotic.

 One of their projects was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), intended as a way for DARPA staffers and researchers to disseminate information and share computing resources. It introduced email, file transfers, and even voice protocols into common use, all made possible through the magic of packet switching - another DARPA innovation. This groundbreaking computer network would, with their guidance, evolve into what we now call the internet.

(Funny, isn't it - the internet upon which you can read anti-military and anti-American rants until your eyes launch themselves from their sockets is the product of an American military project. Euro-weenies will no doubt point out that the World Wide Web was the invention of an Englishman working at a Swiss lab, but his contribution - important as it is - was simply a way of easing access to information on the already vast internet. His work would not even have been necessary had it not been for DARPA.)

The computer network wasn't DARPA's only development, of course - the magnificent Saturn V rocket and the computer mouse both came from the think tanks at the agency. How's that for a wide ranging legacy?

Happy Birthday, DARPA - keep up the good work!

-=[ Grant ]=-
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