How the World Got Wired · A Memex and a Satellite
ARPA
The new agency was called the Advanced Research Projects Agency. People called it ARPA.
ARPA’s job was strange. Most government agencies have a clear thing they do. The Post Office delivers mail. The Department of Agriculture handles farms. ARPA’s job was almost the opposite. ARPA’s job was to handle whatever the regular system couldn’t. It was supposed to fund science projects that were too weird, too long-term, too risky, or too unproven for any normal organization to pay for. Its purpose, in a sentence, was to make sure America was never surprised by another Sputnik.
It had a lot of money. It had very few rules. And — this is the important part — it was allowed to give that money to almost anyone.
Universities. Private companies. Individual scientists with strange ideas. ARPA didn’t need to know exactly what the research would produce. It just needed to believe that the people doing the research were smart, and that what they were trying to do, if it worked, would matter.
This was a new kind of government. For most of American history, when the government wanted scientific work done, it built a laboratory and hired scientists to work in it. ARPA didn’t build laboratories. ARPA wrote checks.
A lot of the checks went to projects that failed completely. ARPA paid for nuclear-powered airplanes that never flew. For psychic experiments that produced nothing. For weapons that didn’t work. That was fine. The whole point of ARPA was that most of its bets would lose, as long as a few of them won enormously.
A few of them did win. Enormously.
One of the bets ARPA made, in the early 1960s, was on a man at MIT who had read Vannevar Bush’s essay about the memex when he was young, and never quite gotten over it. His name was J.C.R. Licklider, and he had recently written a paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis, in which he argued that computers and people would one day work together so closely that they would think as a single mind.
In October of 1962, ARPA hired Licklider to run a brand-new office, called the Information Processing Techniques Office. He was given a budget. He was told he could spend it more or less however he liked, as long as it was on computers.
He had some ideas about what to do.
He started writing memos to a small list of scientists around the country, addressing them — half-jokingly, half-seriously — as Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network.
That is where the internet begins.
But Licklider’s story is the next chapter.
Questions to talk about
No answer key. These are for arguing over, with someone who read the same chapter.
- Bush's worry was that science was producing too much information — a problem most people did not think was a problem. What problems like that exist now?
- A chemist in Boston might spend years on something a chemist in Berlin had already solved. What is the cost of that, repeated across a century?
- Licklider was handed a budget and told to spend it on computers more or less however he liked. When is that a good way to fund work, and when is it reckless?
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