government support for computing research, lessons from history.' online book

Licklider's and IPTO's [Information Processing Techniques Office] success derived in large part from their skills at "selling the vision" in addition to "buying the research" (chapter 4)

only two levels of approval was required:

the director of IPTO and the director of ARPA. "the joy of ARPA . . . . You know, if a program manager has a good idea, he has got two people to convince that that is a good idea before the guy goes to work. He has got the director of his office and the director of ARPA, and that is it. It is such a short chain of command" (Robert Taylor, 1989).

the funding went to group-oriented projects and institutions rather than individuals. geography didn't play a role: MIT, Carnegie Mellon University or Stanford University.

... no single approach to investing in research is by itself a sufficient means of stimulating innovation; ...

Organizations such as NSF and ONR often funded seed work in areas that DARPA, with its larger contract awards, later magnified and expanded. DARPA's Project MAC, which gave momentum to time-shared computing in the 1960s, for example, built on earlier NSF-sponsored work on MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System. Conversely, NSF has provided continued support for projects that DARPA pioneered but was unwilling to sustain after the major research challenges were resolved.

For example, NSF funds the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS)—a system developed at Xerox PARC and institutionalized by DARPA that provides university researchers with access to fast-turnaround semiconductor manufacturing services. Once established, this program no longer matched DARPA's mission to develop leading-edge technologies, but it did match NSF's mission to support university education and research infrastructure. Similarly, NSF built on DARPA's pioneering research on packet-switched networks to construct the NSFNET, a precursor to today's Internet. (p10)

us national bureau of standards (NBS) was also in the business of builidng machines.

When the Univac order was plagued by technical delays, NBS built its own computer in-house. The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) was built for the Air Force and dedicated in 1950, the first operational, electronic, stored-program computer in this country. NBS built a similar machine, the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) for the Navy on the West Coast (Huskey, 1980). Numerous problems were run on SEAC, and the computer also served as a central facility for diffusing expertise in programming to other government agencies.

Despite this significant hardware, however, NBS's bid to be a government center for computing expertise ended in the mid-1950s. Caught up in postwar debates over science policy and a controversy over battery additives, NBS research funding was radically reduced, and NBS lost its momentum in the field of computing (Akera, 1996). (also chapter 4)

arpa rosy cosy at the beginning but 1972 the name was officially changed to darpa

presaging changes in IPTO and its personnel as well. George Heilmeier, director of DARPA from 1975 to 1977, came, unlike his predecessors, from an industrial background. Heilmeier brought an emphasis on applications to DARPA and a more formalized management style to the agency. As one program manager recalled, "During the 1970s . . . there was tremendous pressure to produce stuff that looked like it had a short applications horizon."

licklider came back as program director in 1974-1975 and found it a changed place (Norberg and O'Neill, 1996, pp. 37-38).

After that, the agency had difficulty finding a successor to serve as director of ipto

well, they found robert kahn. he took over 1979 ... once a consultant, as one wrote, for a company who got the contract to produce hardware for arpanet: bolt, beranek, and newman.

rfc, 3439 - Some Internet Architectural Guidelines and Philosophy

This document attempts to codify long-understood Internet architectural principles. In particular, the unifying principle described here is best expressed by the Simplicity Principle, which states complexity must be controlled if one hopes to efficiently scale a complex object.

The idea that simplicity itself can lead to some form of optimality has been a common theme throughout history, and has been stated in many other ways and along many dimensions. For example, consider the maxim known as Occam's Razor, which was formulated by the medieval English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349), and states "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" or "plurality should not be posited without necessity." (hence Occam's Razor is sometimes called "the principle of unnecessary plurality" and " the principle of simplicity").

A perhaps more contemporary formulation of Occam's Razor states that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is the one preferred by nature. Other formulations of the same idea can be found in the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle and the Principle of Least Astonishment (the assertion that the most usable system is the one that least often leaves users astonished). [WILLINGER2002] provides a more theoretical discussion of "robustness through simplicity", and in discussing the PSTN, [KUHN87] states that in most systems, "a trade-off can be made between simplicity of interactions and looseness of coupling".