Jesper Vissing Laursen "The ARPA theme is that the promise offered by the computer as a communication medium between people, dwarfs into relative insignificance the historical beginnings of the computer as an arithmetic engine" If one were to suggest one single occurrence which led to the creation of the Internet, it would be the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. This seminal incident in space exploration caused then American President Dwight David Eisenhower to appoint MIT President James A. Killian as a presidential assistant for science, and subsequently sparked the creation of a new department within the Department of Defense, named the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA was the answer to the rising American Cold War paranoia about military inferiority, fuelled not least by the Sputnik success. The agency was designed to perform long term high risk/high payoff research and development, and in this context placed great emphasis on the development of the at that time fledgling computer technology. It was felt by ARPA that too many resources had been allocated by public and private research in order to procure short-term advances in computer hardware and software. Instead, the Agency realized that "machines needed greater capability to interact with each other to gather relevant information, solve problems, anticipate data requirements, communicate effectively across distances, present information visually, and do all this automatically." "A Universal Network...:" J.C.R. Licklider's Vision | |
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