*The great pioneer Ivan Sutherland is discussing his groundbreaking work in the military, in ARPA, and in the ARPANET, the Cold War ancestor of the Internet. His interviewer would like to know where the money, power and intellectual impetus came from to build such a thing as the ARPANET.
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/pdf.phtml?id=261
ASPRAY: .... The reason I ask is that in our research so far, among government agencies NIH looks like the only competitor to ARPA in terms of having the ability or at least the willingness, to give large contracts to do computing. ... Do you think that that is a fair hypothesis, though, that those are the only two agencies that have this kind of money to support computing at the large scale? ...
SUTHERLAND: Well, I think there was a good deal of classified stuff going on. One should not discount the importance of the intelligence folk in terms of their, I would say, quite vigorous support of equipment. I am not party to all of that they did, but it is quite clear that there was lots of very advanced computing stuff being purchased for their own purposes. You know, you guys can have a fascinating time with how those procurements, which are largely classified procurements, end up being capabilities and the suppliers that then filter into the civilian economy.
ASPRAY: (laugh) Okay. Fine.
SUTHERLAND: You know, the history of science must be a fascinating business, because what you can see is only a piece of it. I went to Project Michigan and infrared was a big subject, and that was in the mid-1960s. That whole area had been classified. It was just a thing that somebody had decided, that "Infrared research activities are something we will keep under our hat." It is only recently that any of that has been getting out into public use. The effect of the decision to classify that activity must be enormous.
I could not decide whether it is a plus or a minus. I guess my own conclusion is that it is about a wash; that we gained an enormous advantage in terms of heat-seeking missiles, in terms of ability to detect what was going on, and night vision, and all kinds of things, and we took enormous advantage out of that, at the price of, you know, heat loss from buildings, the cost of... You know, when you step up to a urinal in the men's room, it flushes itself when you walk away because of the little infrared thing that senses you are there.
ASPRAY: Yes.
SUTHERLAND: We probably could have had those things 15 years earlier. How would you like to play that tradeoff? Would you rather have sidewinders, or...
ASPRAY: (laugh) ... automatic flushers.
SUTHERLAND: ... automatic flushers. I cannot tell, you know (laugh). But I think computing has the same property; that many of the biggest computers were purchased for working on intelligence programs and there was a conscious effort to stimulate faster and better machines - particularly machines, but also programming systems.
(((In some parallel atompunk world, all that Cold War funding went into cybernetic domestic comforts instead of heat-seeking missiles. What do you suppose that world would look like, right now?)))
