IVIV (1) context: ARPA/DARPA

[Doug Millison]

Yeah, I heard it both ways, too, here in the SF Bay Area & Silicon  
Valley in the '70s and early '80s. Maybe it's significant that Pynchon  
says ARPA? I worked with the guy who was Softbank's man on the West  
Coast for some time, one of the early guys on Arpanet prior to that.

My little brother did a research project for his Stanford EE degree,  
in the big hangar at  the NASA facility in Mountain View, using some  
of the first voice synthesis chips, and he showed me an early game  
that was hosted on a rather large H-P box, in the early and mid-70s,  
in the computer center on the Stanford campus.  I was impressed, not  
surprising given the relative level of industrial sophistication in my  
own life.  I'd drive down to the Farm from Berkeley in an old VW Bug  
that, no kidding, had a hole in the roof where the previous owner had  
affixed one of those big joke keys, so he could wind up that little  
sucker, haw haw haw. At the Dutch Goose in Menlo Park we'd drink beer  
and bang around the latest coin-op videogames that Nolan Bushnell  
rotated through that joint as Atari was attaining liftoff.

The community of readers for whom we created and published Morph's  
Outpost on the Digital Frontier http://morphsoutpostonthedigitalfrontier.blogspot.com/ 
   were among the crew who helped turn the Internet into a viable  
World Wide Web, at least the part of that group centered on Multimedia  
Gulch in SF.  One of the first detailed public discussions of the Java  
computer language, for example, was led by its inventor, at the Art  
Teco conference we held in 1994 at Fort Mason Center. I was thrilled  
to moderate the discussion. Aint it great being a cog in a big wheel!

DARPA was then and has continued to invest heavily in research, inside  
academia and out, on virtually all significant hardware and software  
technologies related to computers and communications, robotics, too.   
A  program called the Strategic Computing Initiative caused a bit of a  
stir in the early '80s, tool; I wrote a series of articles on it for  
Metro, a weekly paper published out of San Jose, serving Silicon  
Valley.  Some people were concerned that all the good stuff was going  
first to the military, perhaps some of them still are worried about  
that although this particular program seems to have been shut down.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Computing_Initiative


>  The Advanced Research
> Projects Agency was a creation and a part of DoD from its beginning  
> in 1958.
> It was a matter of habit (and later, in some circles, of politics)  
> whether
> one said ARPA or DARPA. I knew people close to it who said both
> indifferently.
>
> -Monte
>