Maybe a different history of how DARPA and the internet came to be

Interesting story on all the power plays involved in the founding of DARPA... Like the title says a little history filled in for those who might be interested in how many of the departments/history we hear/think of today were formed. How the internet actually came together without Al Gore !! Sputnik, Vietnam, NASA, and how national security was, and still is the driving force (right or wrong) for American policies IMO. youtu.be...

a reply to: 727Sky


Apparently it was started as somekind of quasi-civilian agency to deflect from any accusations of using space for nefarious purposes ...

The agency was created on February 7, 1958, by President Dwight Eisenhower in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957

If we'd been given the go-ahead, we could have beat Sputnik by a year. We had the hardware over in Redstone, sitting in warehouses ready to go.

The question was would the Soviet Union accept an over-flight by an American satellite over its territory?

A few days after Sputnik was launched, the Department of Defense was telling Eisenhower that the Soviets have done us a good turn. They had established a precedent of over-flight, exactly what Eisenhower wanted to do initially, and now the Soviets had done it for us.

Sputnik Declassified - NOVA

I was a systems engineer starting in the early 80's and while I worked mostly on large mainframes, we experienced and also helped to develop much of what networks have become.

Without details, Darpa Net and Bitnet were around when we were using Wais and Gopher. Dec had the first real network, DecNet and Apple was doing great things with AppleTalk, and this turned into AOL. Microsoft was tinkering with SMB and MS-NET but IP and Novel were responsible for most of the Microsoft networking. CompuServe was becoming very popular and TCP/IP was used as the foundation of HyperText protocols which became the backbone of the Internet with Mozilla/Netscape as the first real browser and the search engine was Alta-Vista...... The explosion after all of this fills volumes...

Just off the cuff and the order not necessarily correct, but it was a fun time.

a reply to: 727Sky

Yes.

It was called ARPA prior to the DOD getting involved, and it was, completely civilian.

Internet was invented for the Armed Forces to communicate, in a closed network, independent from other means.

originally posted by: ADVISOR
a reply to: 727Sky

Yes.

It was called ARPA prior to the DOD getting involved, and it was, completely civilian.

....

Here's what Wikipedia says:

"The creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 for the purpose of forming and executing research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, and able to reach far beyond immediate military requirements. The two relevant acts are the Supplemental Military Construction Authorization (Air Force) (Public Law 85-325) and Department of Defense Directive 5105.15, in February 1958. It was placed within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and counted approximately 150 people."

I'm pretty sure it's always been attached to DoD.