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Listen, mr throwaway account, if we're starting at the top of the document: "The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been assigned a new task that

Listen, mr throwaway account, if we're starting at the top of the document: "The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been assigned a new task that must be activated immediately, and I must devote the whole of the coming week to it." You know, the line you had to skip a few paragraphs ahead of to find your quotes.

throw0101a 2y ago
From Wizards (chapter one): > Licklider was no exception to the rule that people didn’t spend a long time at ARPA. But by the time he left in 1964, he had succeeded in shifting the agency’s emphasis in computing R&D from a command systems laboratory playing out war-game scenarios to advanced research in time-sharing systems, computer graphics, and improved computer languages. The name of the office, Command and Control Research, had changed to reflect that shift, becoming the Information Processing Techniques Office. […] > Taylor told the ARPA director he needed to discuss funding for a networking experiment he had in mind. Herzfeld had talked about networking with Taylor a bit already, so the idea wasn’t new to him. He had also visited Taylor’s office, where he witnessed the annoying exercise of logging on to three different computers. And a few years earlier he had even fallen under the spell of Licklider himself when he attended Lick’s lectures on interactive computing. > Taylor gave his boss a quick briefing: IPTO contractors, most of whom were at research universities, were beginning to request more and more computer resources. Every principal investigator, it seemed, wanted his own computer. Not only was there an obvious duplication of effort across the research community, but it was getting damned expensive. Computers weren’t small and they weren’t cheap. Why not try tying them all together? By building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers doing similar work in different parts of the country could share resources and results more easily. Instead of spreading a half dozen expensive mainframes across the country devoted to supporting advanced graphics research, ARPA could concentrate resources in one or two places and build a way for everyone to get at them. One university might concentrate on one thing, another research center could be funded to concentrate on something else, but regardless of where you were physically located, you would have access to it all. He suggested that ARPA fund a small test network, starting with, say, four nodes and building up to a dozen or so. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... Also: > Licklider described how he had re-envisioned command and control research as research into interactive computing as follows:[5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Techniques_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Techniq... From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient...
- palisade 2y ago
  I think it is a bit convenient to toss out all the clear evidence that they were developing survivable networks.
  - throw0101a 2y ago
    What is clear is that: * Licklider changes the name from "Command & Control Research" to "Information Processing Techniques Office" before he left and Robert Taylor takes over.† * Taylor convinced Charles M. Herzfeld to build a resource sharing network. * Taylor recruited Larry Roberts to design/build ARPAnet. Wesley A. Clark was part of the design/build team. * Roberts didn't have any kind of goal related to nuclear survivability (per interviews with him in published sources/books). * Roberts met Donald Davies. Davies had no interest in nuclear survivability. Davies introduced Roberts to Paul Baran's work. Is any of the above in dispute? Did anyone other than Baran ever express interest in nuclear survivability? † Given Licklider efforts in the name change, can anything be gleaned by his about intentions‡ in the way he wants the office/department to go? ‡ Can anything further be gleaned by the fact that one of the first papers Licklider published was called "Man-Computer Symbiosis"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Computer_Symbiosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Computer_Symbiosis See perhaps §5.1: > Any present-day large-scale computer is too fast and too costly for real-time cooperative thinking with one man. Clearly, for the sake of efficiency and economy, the computer must divide its time among many users. Timesharing systems are currently under active development. There are even arrangements to keep users from "clobbering" anything but their own personal programs. > It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users. * https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

throw0101a 2y ago

From Wizards (chapter one): > Licklider was no exception to the rule that people didn’t spend a long time at ARPA. But by the time he left in 1964, he had succeeded in shifting the agency’s emphasis in computing R&D from a command systems laboratory playing out war-game scenarios to advanced research in time-sharing systems, computer graphics, and improved computer languages. The name of the office, Command and Control Research, had changed to reflect that shift, becoming the Information Processing Techniques Office. […] > Taylor told the ARPA director he needed to discuss funding for a networking experiment he had in mind. Herzfeld had talked about networking with Taylor a bit already, so the idea wasn’t new to him. He had also visited Taylor’s office, where he witnessed the annoying exercise of logging on to three different computers. And a few years earlier he had even fallen under the spell of Licklider himself when he attended Lick’s lectures on interactive computing. > Taylor gave his boss a quick briefing: IPTO contractors, most of whom were at research universities, were beginning to request more and more computer resources. Every principal investigator, it seemed, wanted his own computer. Not only was there an obvious duplication of effort across the research community, but it was getting damned expensive. Computers weren’t small and they weren’t cheap. Why not try tying them all together? By building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers doing similar work in different parts of the country could share resources and results more easily. Instead of spreading a half dozen expensive mainframes across the country devoted to supporting advanced graphics research, ARPA could concentrate resources in one or two places and build a way for everyone to get at them. One university might concentrate on one thing, another research center could be funded to concentrate on something else, but regardless of where you were physically located, you would have access to it all. He suggested that ARPA fund a small test network, starting with, say, four nodes and building up to a dozen or so. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... Also: > Licklider described how he had re-envisioned command and control research as research into interactive computing as follows:[5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Techniques_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Techniq... From chapter two of Wizards: > Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren’t high on Roberts’s agenda. But Baran’s insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Roberts_(computer_scient...

palisade 2y ago
I think it is a bit convenient to toss out all the clear evidence that they were developing survivable networks.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  What is clear is that: * Licklider changes the name from "Command & Control Research" to "Information Processing Techniques Office" before he left and Robert Taylor takes over.† * Taylor convinced Charles M. Herzfeld to build a resource sharing network. * Taylor recruited Larry Roberts to design/build ARPAnet. Wesley A. Clark was part of the design/build team. * Roberts didn't have any kind of goal related to nuclear survivability (per interviews with him in published sources/books). * Roberts met Donald Davies. Davies had no interest in nuclear survivability. Davies introduced Roberts to Paul Baran's work. Is any of the above in dispute? Did anyone other than Baran ever express interest in nuclear survivability? † Given Licklider efforts in the name change, can anything be gleaned by his about intentions‡ in the way he wants the office/department to go? ‡ Can anything further be gleaned by the fact that one of the first papers Licklider published was called "Man-Computer Symbiosis"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Computer_Symbiosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Computer_Symbiosis See perhaps §5.1: > Any present-day large-scale computer is too fast and too costly for real-time cooperative thinking with one man. Clearly, for the sake of efficiency and economy, the computer must divide its time among many users. Timesharing systems are currently under active development. There are even arrangements to keep users from "clobbering" anything but their own personal programs. > It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users. * https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html