DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is the Defense Dept.’s famous research branch.
Created at the height of the Cold War to bolster U.S. military technology following the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite launch, the agency has a long history of innovation.
Most famously, DARPA’s researchers first linked together computers at four locations in the early 1960s to form the ARPANET, a computer network for researchers that was the core of what eventually grew into the Internet.
Other breakthroughs have fueled big advances in commercial areas , including:
- GPS
DARPA co-funded the original satellites used for GPS in 1960. By the 1980s its research helped miniaturize GPS receivers, making them portable and inexpensive enough for use in everything from automobiles to cell phones. - COMPUTER MOUSE
An agency-sponsored researcher named Douglas Engelbart invented the now ubiquitous device in 1964. The original model was made of wood and had a single button. - INTERNET
DARPA developed the military network, the ARPANET, from which the Internet later emerged. Launched with four connected sites in 1969, it eventually linked universities and think tanks before an international network was commercialized in the mid-1990s. - UNIX
In the 1960s, the agency funded the further development of the computer operating system known as UNIX, which remains in widespread use today by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others. - PARALLEL COMPUTING
In the 1990s, DARPA funded research into a technology that breaks apart highly complex problems into pieces and solves them in parallel. It is now commonly employed in high-performance computing.
Excerpted from Business Week, Can the Military Find the Answer to Alternative Energy?, July 23, 2009
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_31/b4141032537895.htm
The Homa Files 
August 7, 2009 at 2:51 pm |
NASA did manage to get us into space and eventually onto the moon, right? I’m so tired of the notion that everything the government touches turns to garbage, but that private business is infallible.
August 8, 2009 at 1:52 am |
The U.S. needs to invest in hard core basic research again. These investments that we made years ago have paid dividends for decades. One area where U.S. needs to invest is battery technology. As fossil fuels become increasingly expensive, our country will turn electric. There are several companies that are working on smaller fision and fusion reactors. Nuclear energy is the future. Obama said he was against nuclear energy during the election campaign to appeal to the greens, but he fast tracked all the nuclear reactors that had been stalled under the Bush administration as soon as he got into office. The Chinese have assembled a team of 3,000 engineers to develop new battery technology for cars.