Steve,
A fine piece, though you take the Official Truths a little too seriously.
"Structured as an agile operation," may be said to be a sweet and nice way of saying "slush fund." "Overseen by both DoD management and the relevant Congressional committees and subcommittees" is a fine joke for the morning. In those days Federal budgets tended to be published about half way through the fiscal year, but I believe Junior Bush achieved the astonishing trick of publishing a budget after the entire year was over. Even today, with Congressional staffs quadruple what they were back then, DARPA is so small that I doubt it gets more than a couple of staffers' mornings of serious consideration in a year.
The addition of the D was entirely cosmetic, purely for the purpose of paying lip-service to the Mansfield Amendment. The name had nothing to do with the evolution of the agency itself. In 1962 it was just loose money contributed by whichever Pentagon office could be made to cough it up toward the end of the year. By ten years later, when then-Senator Mansfied was concerned about the possible corrupting influence of military money, it had a relatively fixed name, offices, and staff. The solidification has continued, as you detail.
FWIW, at the time when "the Net" had seven nodes two of them were in the UK, the Defence Establishment, in London, and the fine artificial intelligence group up in Edinborough. Both ARPAnet and DARPAnet were rare.
A fine piece, though you take the Official Truths a little too seriously.
"Structured as an agile operation," may be said to be a sweet and nice way of saying "slush fund." "Overseen by both DoD management and the relevant Congressional committees and subcommittees" is a fine joke for the morning. In those days Federal budgets tended to be published about half way through the fiscal year, but I believe Junior Bush achieved the astonishing trick of publishing a budget after the entire year was over. Even today, with Congressional staffs quadruple what they were back then, DARPA is so small that I doubt it gets more than a couple of staffers' mornings of serious consideration in a year.
The addition of the D was entirely cosmetic, purely for the purpose of paying lip-service to the Mansfield Amendment. The name had nothing to do with the evolution of the agency itself. In 1962 it was just loose money contributed by whichever Pentagon office could be made to cough it up toward the end of the year. By ten years later, when then-Senator Mansfied was concerned about the possible corrupting influence of military money, it had a relatively fixed name, offices, and staff. The solidification has continued, as you detail.
FWIW, at the time when "the Net" had seven nodes two of them were in the UK, the Defence Establishment, in London, and the fine artificial intelligence group up in Edinborough. Both ARPAnet and DARPAnet were rare.
On Tue, 15 Mar 2022 at 09:00, Steve Crocker <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Adding to Vint's comments:I was at (D)ARPA from mid 1971 to mid 1974. Bob Kahn arrived in late 1972. Vint came a few years after I left.The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik. It was placed within the Defense Department's Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). I believe OSD was about 2,000 people. ARPA was approximately 150 people. It was purposefully structured as an agile operation, authorized to define its own projects and get them moving quickly. Its authority and operation were overseen by both DoD management and the relevant Congressional committees and subcommittees. "Slush fund" is a pejorative term that mischaracterizes the organization.In 1972, following a decision to reduce the size of OSD, ARPA was moved out of OSD and became a Defense agency. This put it in the same status as the other Defense agencies, e.g., Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), et al. In the process, "ARPA" acquired the "D" and became DARPA. There was no appreciable change in the mission, structure or operation of the agency. On paper, the director of DARPA now reported directly to the Secretary of Defense instead of the Defense Director for Research and Engineering (DDR&E). In practice, the reporting lines remained the same. I don't believe the transition had anything to do with the Mansfield amendment. (D)ARPA was unabashedly doing work on a wide range of military technologies both before and after the transition. Each internal funding memo included a section describing the relevance of the effort being funded to the overall DoD mission. I wrote my share of these, as did every program manager. See the next paragraphs for a key point related to this.Internally, (D)ARPA is divided into a handful of Offices. Each Office focuses on specific technologies. Offices are created, folded down, and renamed at various times. In the beginning, ARPA focused on the space program. In 1962, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) was formed to focus on advanced computer science technology. JCR Licklider was the first director. The Office funded research across a broad spectrum of computer science topics ranging from time-sharing systems, graphics, multiprocessor architectures, and artificial intelligence. Many of these ideas had already been articulated and pursued in a few labs around the country. IPTO was able to put considerably more money into these areas.The Offices were how the agency was structured from a personnel point of view. From a budget point of view, the agency was structured in terms of "programs." Each program had a budget and an objective. These were documented and reported to DoD management and Congress each year.Most of the Offices had programs that were intended to yield results within a few years. However, IPTO, the Materials Science Office, and the Behavioral Sciences Office funded research with a *much* longer time horizon. These were considered "basic research" offices, in contrast to the other "development" Offices. The aggregate funding for basic research was just a small fraction of the overall (D)ARPA budget, which meant that most of (D)ARPA's funding was producing visible results fairly regularly. The budgets and progress of the basic research Offices were still reviewed annually, but the expectations were adjusted.The terms "basic research" and "development" correspond to the budget designations "6.1" and "6.2." Line 6 in McNamara's famous reorganization of the Defense budget was Research, Development, Test and Engineering (RDT&E), with designations of 6.1 through 6.4. The funding levels were significantly different, i.e. 6.1 << 6.2 << 6.3 << 6.4. (D)ARPA's funding was limited to just 6.1 and 6.2 programs.In terms of its budget, IPTO evolved and became a hybrid Office with two programs, one with 6.1 funding and one with 6.2 funding. The artificial intelligence work was part of the 6.1 budget. The big system developments, e.g., Illiac IV and Multics, were part of the 6.2 budget.As noted, the idea of a network had been written about and was definitely part of the vision. There were a handful of small efforts to connect two or three computers. The Arpanet was conceived and initiated in 1965-66. After a couple of years of planning, the Request for Quotation for the IMPs was released in 1968. Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, MA was selected, and work began in 1969. The first IMP was delivered to UCLA at the beginning of September that year.When the Arpanet was up and running, IPTO began to look at packet radio and packet satellite networking. With strong support from the director of the agency, Steve Lukasik, a third budget line item was created, also within the overall 6.2 budget, that focused on communications.============================I believe the use of the exclamation point (!), informally called "bang," was part of the UUNET routing scheme, not the Arpanet routing or email addressing.SteveOn Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 7:59 AM vinton cerf via InternetPolicy <internetpolicy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:1. Arpanet was never called "Darpanet"2. I don't think we ever "numbered" users since getting on the Arpanet was mostly by having an account on a time-sharing computer at a university (or research lab) that had an ARPA contract.3. "bangs" were at email level, not Arpanet (or Internet) level of routing. The "bang" email addresses aided routing through application level gateways.4. Bob Kahn, Dave Walden, Frank Heart and many others at BBN did the Arpanet IMP design. The Arpanet Host-Host NCP effort was led by Steve Crocker (Jon Postel and I and others helped) and stabilized enough to support email in 1971 and a public demonstration in October 1972. The Internet work started the next year in 1973. Since Internet was conceived as a network of networks, you needed more than one network to make an Internet. There were three to begin with: Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet Satellite Net, all funded by ARPA._______________________________________________On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 4:50 AM David Lloyd-Jones via InternetPolicy <internetpolicy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Willi,
You have shown us that you are full of good sentiments. Quite a lot of them. Very good ones. I assume that you know something about the start and development of the Internet but no such knowledge has found its way into your long post.
.
First proposed by Bacon in the fifteenth century or so, the 'Net was a solid policy proposal made by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It was made possible by the invention of packet-switching in the mid-1960 to 70s. Johnny Foster, JFK's science advisor in 1961, was the first person I know of to have done solid financing of the effort. Bush was working on wide-scale computer networking, along with many other things, when I met him in his utterly false "retirement" in Lexington, Mass. in 1976. This was well before your Reagan Administration.
The original present "internet" was ARPAnet (on which I was user #300 in 1971). This was financed before it really existed by ARPA when that "Agency" was more-or-less a slush fund passed around at random in the Pentagon. It continued as DARPAnet after they added that "D," for defence, to pretend compliance with the Mansfield Amendment. I worked on this on Congressional staff in 1969-71 and at MIT in '72. The D was tacked on in December '71 or January '72, I forget, but had been in the works ever since Mansfied, as Senator, had tried to prevent military money from corrupting civilian research. Unfortunately, civilian researchers cried piteously that they wanted to be corrupted. By then, Mansfied was ambassador to Japan....
When the scalability of the internetted nets, DARPAnet, began to seem limited, -- all those !!! "bangs," -- its growth was smoothed by the development of the present TCP/IP, credited to Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf. When Cerf later went to work for MCI, a hapless little phone company, their PR department tub-thumped that he was "the" founder of "the" Internet. Many people seem to have believed this inanity. More recently this has been toned down to "a" founder of the Internet. In fact packet-switching, the key invention, was largely the work of Lenny Kleinrock, under whom Cerf studied as a university student. Their much later contribution to TCP/IP has certainly been useful._______________________________________________On Fri, 11 Mar 2022 at 13:07, willi uebelherr via InternetPolicy <internetpolicy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Why the World Must Resist Calls to Undermine the Internet
Andrew Sullivan, 02.03.2022
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/03/why-the-world-must-resist-calls-to-undermine-the-internet/
Dear friends,
Andrew Sullivan rightly pointed out in his text that "the Internet is
for everyone". Absolutely right in the idea.
But the reality is different. The technical players acting today are not
interested in a free global communication of people, but in a
commercialization and capitalization of their needs for communication.
This result did not come about by chance, but was already the essential
guiding principle at the beginning by the government of the USA under
Ronald Reagan. The original concept of "the inter-connection of local
Net-works", which is necessarily based on local networks, became a
privately and state organized system of interconnected star-systems,
"the inter-connection of private Star-Systems".
This interconnection of star-systems creates the possibility to organize
access and exclusion according to arbitrary criteria. And we see today
that the system of a free global communication has turned into a field
of censorship and private control mania, organized by countries calling
themselves "the West". Already the naming points to organized bullshit,
because the planet is a sphere and not a disk and thus any directions
can lead to the same goal.
The actors of this fragmentation and breaking of a free human
communication "without borders" are those who call themselves
representatives of a "free world", but in fact trample every diversity
with military boots. Every form of racial mania a'la Cecil Rhodes is put
back on the table. Lying and hypocrisy is the form of communication that
is now elevated to the absolute.
The idea of telecommunication in the form of an Internet that does not
adhere to private or governmental or geographical boundaries, as we saw
with Jonathan Postel, was destroyed at the very beginning of the life of
an Internet. Today we see what a monster of small-minded power madness
it has developed into, where only private profit interests and state
delusions of control apply.
The alternative always remains. A telecommunication in the form of an
internet, which rests on local networks and thus enables free access to
all people of our planet, independent of their social situation and
geographical position.
That and only that is a "net of nets".
with kind regards, willi
Asuncion, Paraguay
in german -----------------------------------------------------------
Liebe freunde,
Andrew Sullivan hat zu Recht in seinem Text darauf hingewiesen, "the
Internet is for everyone". Absolut richtig in der Idee.
Aber die Wirklichkeit sieht anders aus. Die heute agierenden technischen
Akteure sind nicht an einer freien globalen Kommunikation der Menschen
interessiert, sondern an einer Kommerzialisierung und Kapitalisierung
ihrer Beduerfnisse nach Kommunikation.
Dieses Resultat ist nicht zufaellig entstanden, sondern war bereits zu
Anfang das wesentliche Leitmotiv durch die Regierung der USA unter
Ronald Reagan. Das urspruengliche Konzept "the Inter-connection of local
Net-works", das ja notwendig auf lokalen Netzwerken ruht, wurde zu einem
privat und staatlich organisierten System von verbundenen Sternsystemen,
"the inter-connection of private Star-Systems".
Diese Verbindung von Stern-Systemen schafft die Moeglichkeit, nach
beliebigsten Kriterien den Zugang und Ausschluss zu organisieren. Und
wir sehen heute, dass sich das System einer freien globalen
Kommunikation zu einem Feld der Zensur und privatem Kontrollwahn
entwickelt hat, das von Laendern organisiert wird, die sich "der Westen"
nennen. Schon die Namensgebung deutet auf organisierten Schwachsinn,
weil der Planet eine Kugel und keine Scheibe ist und damit beliebige
Richtungen zum gleichen Ziel fuehren koennen.
Die Akteure dieser Zersplitterung und Zerbrechung einer freien
menschlichen Kommunikation "ohne Grenzen" sind jene, die sich als
Vertreter einer "freien Welt" bezeichnen, tatsaechlich aber jede
Diversitaet mit militaerischen Stiefeln zertrampeln. Jede Form des
Rassenwahns a'la Cecil Rhodes wird wieder auf den Tisch gestellt. Die
Luege und Heuchelei ist diejenige Form der Kommunikation, die nun zum
absoluten Mass erhoben wird.
Die Idee einer Telekommunikation in Form eines Internet, das sich nicht
an private oder staatliche oder geografische Grenzen haelt, wie wir es
bei Jonathan Postel sahen, wurde schon zu Beginn der Lebensphase eines
Internet zerstoert. Heute sehen wir, zu welchem Monster kleingeistigem
Machtwahns es sich entwickelt hat, wo nur noch private Profitinteressen
und staatlicher Kontrollwahn gelten.
Die Alternative bleibt immer existent. Eine Telekommunikation in Form
eines internet, das auf lokalen Netzwerken ruht und so allen Menschen
unseres Planeten den freien Zugang ermoeglicht, unabhaengig von ihrer
sozialen Lage und geografischen Position.
Das und nur das ist ein "Netz der Netze".
mit lieben gruessen, willi
Asuncion, Paraguay
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