> Taylor had an even more practical reason to crave a network. He was regularly getting requests from researchers around the country for funds to buy bigger and

> Taylor had an even more practical reason to crave a network. He was regularly getting requests from researchers around the country for funds to buy bigger and better mainframe computers. > Taylor talked ARPA director Charles Herzfeld into allocating a million dollars for R&D into a new network to connect the computers at MIT, UCLA, SRI, and many other sites. Herzfeld got the money by redirecting it from a ballistic missile research program into the ARPA budget. The cost was justified within DoD circles by saying that ARPA was tasked with building a “survivable” network that wouldn’t go down if any specific part was destroyed, perhaps in a nuclear attack. This story seems very similar to the Unix story[1]. Ritchie and Thompson wanted to play Space Travel and started building Unix. Eventually, management invested for a different reason: they wanted a good system for text processing of patent applications. I guess in the early days, no one saw the potential of computers and networking. Therefore there had to be a weird convergence of interests of various stakeholders for projects to get off the ground. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix