virtually every arpa director, and most arpa personnel at all levels, have encountered friendly and not-so-friendly "why arpa?" and " what is arpa?" questions throughout its history. this report seeks to explain some of the "whys" and "whats." | Barber Associates, Richard J.: The Advanced Research Projects Agency 1958-1974, report prepared for the Advanced Projects Research Agency under contract MDA 903-74-C-0096. Defense Technical Information Center, Springfield, Va., December 1975

be aware the pdf has more than 600 pages but its free (compared to these chaps who ask for money for something that is in the public domain), gives the whole picture what arpa was all about and is more readable than other scans.

In 1951, the British computer company Ferranti developed the Nim-playing digital computer Nimrod. Nimrod was designed to illustrate the principles of automatic computers in general and was the first computer exclusively designed to play a game (Bowden, 1953, 201). Nimrod was displayed for six months at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain in London and took on all comers(Bowden, 1953, 286).

It was later shown at the Trade Fair in Berlin. Germans had never seen anything like it and came to see it in thousands. It was neccessary to call out special police to control the crowds. The machine became even more popular after it had defeated the Economics Minister Dr. Ludwig | history of computer playing, anker helms jørgensen: an early danish computer game: the case of nim, piet hein, and regnecentralen

datamuseum, danmark

the proceedings of hinc2 will be published by ifip next spring ...
in the meantime ola nordal has a conference report

they had a tech meeting at the beginning of august and their talks are online. also 2004 scripts are worth a look.

they are celebrating their 50th anniversary on the 4th of octubre.

By the way, if you don’t have plans for November 3rd, we are looking for volunteers. We have plenty of moving vehicles, but we are short on Pedestrians | tether, chief of drapa about the real-world autonomous vehicles urban challenge

low tech against high tech | sfgate