4 ms·

A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, j

A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with. The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

Peaches4Rent 9mo ago
Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes". I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future. It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense. Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  Not to go heads I win, tails you lose, but even if we go down this path - it's the same story because militaries are investing heavily in LLM stuff, both overtly and covertly. Outside of its obvious uses in modeling, data management, and other such things - there also seems to be a fairly widespread belief, among the powers that be, that if you just say the magic words to somebody, that you can make them believe anything. So hyper-scaling LLM potential has direct military application, same as Starlink and Starship.
  - nurumaik 9mo ago
    I think it's much simpler: smart mass surveillance. With LLMs you can finally read and analyze all messages people send to each other
- King-Aaron 9mo ago
  I'm starting to wonder if a person like Elon with his... morals... is who we want to be creating a vision for the future.
  - vibeprofessor 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - King-Aaron 9mo ago
      [flagged]
    - jacquesm 9mo ago
      Bollocks, by your standards we can't discuss the most vile people because 'nobody's perfect' but there is a huge gap between the likes of Musk and ordinary people.
      - somenameforme 9mo ago
        Indeed, at least a $700 billion gap. One is reminded of a great Mark Twain quote, "Whereas principle is a great and noble protection against showy and degrading vanities and vices, poverty is worth six of it."
        jacquesm 9mo ago
        The problem is that the Venn diagram of 'vile people' and 'billionaires' has a lot of overlap so these people are doing a disproportionate amount of damage.
  - duskdozer 9mo ago
    Starting?
  - 1dontnkow_ 9mo ago
    You phrased it in a way as we decided to or somebody even asked us. I don't think that's how it works. Humans don't sit together and decide their future, we aren't that coordinated or united. But people like Elon and other people or groups, with the right resources, network, luck, talent and money build their vision of the future and how it turns out nobody knows until it happens.
WalterBright 9mo ago
The digital internet began with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s. Many, many network protocols were developed and used.
- LPisGood 9mo ago
  Really? That is so interesting - which ones? Any ancestors of commonly used ones today?
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    Off the top of my head BIX, Prodigy, Compuserve, MCIMail, BBS, Ethernet, Token Ring, $25 Network, AOL, Timeshare, Kermit, Fax Anyone with 2+ computers immediately thought about connecting them.
- littlestymaar 9mo ago
  > with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s. Late 1700 actually, and war was indeed a key motivation for the deployment of the Télégraphe Chappe.
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    See "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers" https://www.amazon.com/dp/162040592X https://www.amazon.com/dp/162040592X Télégraphe Chappe was a semaphore system using flags. It was not an electrical telegraph, nor was it binary.
    - littlestymaar 9mo ago
      It wasn't binary nor electrical, but it was already digital. Excluding it would be arbitrarily restrictive.
      - DrPhish 9mo ago
        Wouldn’t you also need to include the Ancient Greek phryctoriae military fire signalling system by that logic? It probably wasn’t the first, at that.
saratogacx 9mo ago
I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations. You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- pantalaimon 9mo ago
  > You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory Then you have to also count the Z3 which predates the Colossus by 2 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
WD-42 9mo ago
That’s not the point of the person you are replying to. They are saying if we somehow come up with the tech that makes harnessing the sun a thing, the best we can still do is put a bunch of GPUs in space? It makes no sense.
- trhway 9mo ago
  >the best we can oh, we'll sure find a way to weaponize that energy for example - just imagine all those panels simultaneously turning their reflective back in a way to form gigantic mirror to focus reflected solar energy on your enemy, be that enemy in space or on the Earth/Moon/Mars ground. Basically space-scale version of 'death ray scyscrapper' https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wreaking-havoc-on-london-for-a-few-totally-insane-reasons-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wrea.... Back in the day the Star Wars program was intending to use nuclear explosions to power the lasers, i guess once all that solar for AI gets deployed in space we wouldn't need the explosions anymore. Interesting that such space deployment can deny access to space to anybody else, and that means that any competitive superpower has to rush to deploy similar scale system of their own. Space race v2.
  - SllX 9mo ago
    Pick any Gundam series and watch the last 5 or 6 episodes, at least through the Gundam SEED/Destiny era. At least part of the plot will invariably include a space-based superweapon being deployed by one side of the war to end all wars and the the plot for a few episodes will include the other side engaging in a series of challenges to keep that from firing again and destroying it if possible.
- rob74 9mo ago
  It kinda does make sense if you consider that solar panels in space have been used for a very long time (to power satellites). However, getting the electricity they generate down to Earth is very complicated, so you end up having to use it in space, and one of few things that would make sense for that is indeed data centers, because getting the data to Earth is easier (and Elon already handily has a solution for that). However I'm curious how many solar panels you would need to power a typical data center. Are we talking something like a large satellite, or rather a huge satellite with ISS-size solar arrays bolted on? Getting rid of the copious amounts of heat that data centers generate might also be a challenge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control)...
vidarh 9mo ago
Yes, but isn't that pretty much the point of the person you replied to? We know that a lot of inventions were motivated by that, and so it is incredibly myopic to not pause and try to think through the likely far broader implications.
- mike_hearn 9mo ago
  OK, so what are they? Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own. At best, it makes it easier to change the grid to renewable power, if you ignore the intermittency problem that still exists even at huge scales. PV fabs aren't really reusable for other purposes though, and PV tech is pretty mature already, so it's not clear what scaling that up will do. Scaling rocketry has several fascinating implications but Elon already covered many of them in his blog post. Scaling AI - just read the HN front page every day ;) What are we missing here? Some combinatoric thing?
  - mathw 9mo ago
    Scaling up PV production to the point where we could convert the entire Earth's electricity generation to solar is incredibly significant. Yes there's the problem of intermittency, varying sun availability and so forth - which is why solar will never provide 100% of our power and we'll also need grid-scale storage facilities and domestic batteries and all sorts of stuff - but just imagine being able to make that many panels in the first place! Literally solar on every roof, that's transformative. But sure, let's send it all to space to power questionable "AI" datacentres so we can make more fake nudes.
  - vidarh 9mo ago
    Just scratching at the surface, assuming the increase in production capacity is only realistically possible if you can bring prices down (or this "project" would start to consume a proportion of economic output large enough to seem implausible), you can address the intermittency problem in several ways: Driving down the cost makes massive overprovision a means of reducing the intermittency because you will be able to cover demand at proportionally far lower output, which also means you'll be able to cover demands in far larger areas, even before looking at storage. But lower solar costs would also make storage more cost effective, since power cost will be a lower proportion of the amortised cost of the total system. Same with increasing transmission investments to allow smoothing load. Ever cost drop for solar will make it able to cover a larger proportion of total power demand, and we're nowhere near maximising viable total capacity even at current costs. A whole lot of industrial costs are also affected by energy prices. Drive down this down, and you should expect price drops in other areas as well as industrial uses where energy expensive processes are not cost-effective today. The geopolitical consequences of a dramatic acceleration of the drop in dependency on oil and gas would also take decades to play out. At the same time, if you can drive down the cost of energy by making solar so much cheaper, you also make earth-bound data centres more cost-competive, and the cost-advantage of space-bound data centres would be accordingly lower. I think it's an interesting idea to explore (but there's the whole issue of cooling being far harder in space), but I also think the effects would be far broader. By all means, if Musk wants to poor resources into making solar cheap enough for this kind of project to be viable, he should go ahead - maybe it'll consume enough of time to give him less time to plan a teenage edgelor - because I think the societal effects of driving down energy costs would generally be positive, AI or not, it just screams of being a justification for an xAI purchase done mostly for his personal financial engineering.
andrepd 9mo ago
Well computers are a funny story. The groundwork had been laid and the theoretical and engineering advances that would produce programmable digital computers were well underway in the 1930s. It would have happened very soon even if there was no war, but of course WWII happened right in 1939, so obviously computers made at that time had the purpose of calculating artillery paths or decrypting German messages. But it would be incorrect to say that military applications in WWII are the reason computers were invented.
bydlocoder 9mo ago
The only purely military thing is rockets and everything space related, there's just no way private businesses would've poured so much money into it Computers and internet being storage, processing and communication systems are clearly useful for civilian purposes
throw0101a 9mo ago
> Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. [citation needed] Because according to Bob Taylor, who initially got the funding for what became ARPANET: > Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge. > Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. When* Time magazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... § Prologue > 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. […] * Wizards § Chapter 1 The first four IMPs were UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah. Then BBN, MIT, RAND, System Development Corp., and Harvard. Next Lincoln Laboratory and Stanford, and by the end of 1970 Carnegie-Mellon University and Case Western Reserve University. It was only "later in the 1970s" that command and control was considered more (Lukasik): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Debate_about_design_goals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Debate_about_design_go... But the first two people who get the project going, Taylor and Herzfeld, were about the efficient use of expensive computer resources for research. Look at the firs >dozen sites and they were about linking researchers: the first DoD site wasn't connected until 3-4 years after things go going, and there was nothing classified about it. MILNET didn't occur until 1984: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Operation

Peaches4Rent 9mo ago

Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes". I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future. It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense. Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive

somenameforme 9mo ago
Not to go heads I win, tails you lose, but even if we go down this path - it's the same story because militaries are investing heavily in LLM stuff, both overtly and covertly. Outside of its obvious uses in modeling, data management, and other such things - there also seems to be a fairly widespread belief, among the powers that be, that if you just say the magic words to somebody, that you can make them believe anything. So hyper-scaling LLM potential has direct military application, same as Starlink and Starship.
- nurumaik 9mo ago
  I think it's much simpler: smart mass surveillance. With LLMs you can finally read and analyze all messages people send to each other
King-Aaron 9mo ago
I'm starting to wonder if a person like Elon with his... morals... is who we want to be creating a vision for the future.
- vibeprofessor 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - King-Aaron 9mo ago
    [flagged]
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    Bollocks, by your standards we can't discuss the most vile people because 'nobody's perfect' but there is a huge gap between the likes of Musk and ordinary people.
    - somenameforme 9mo ago
      Indeed, at least a $700 billion gap. One is reminded of a great Mark Twain quote, "Whereas principle is a great and noble protection against showy and degrading vanities and vices, poverty is worth six of it."
      - jacquesm 9mo ago
        The problem is that the Venn diagram of 'vile people' and 'billionaires' has a lot of overlap so these people are doing a disproportionate amount of damage.
- duskdozer 9mo ago
  Starting?
- 1dontnkow_ 9mo ago
  You phrased it in a way as we decided to or somebody even asked us. I don't think that's how it works. Humans don't sit together and decide their future, we aren't that coordinated or united. But people like Elon and other people or groups, with the right resources, network, luck, talent and money build their vision of the future and how it turns out nobody knows until it happens.

WalterBright 9mo ago

The digital internet began with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s. Many, many network protocols were developed and used.

LPisGood 9mo ago
Really? That is so interesting - which ones? Any ancestors of commonly used ones today?
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  Off the top of my head BIX, Prodigy, Compuserve, MCIMail, BBS, Ethernet, Token Ring, $25 Network, AOL, Timeshare, Kermit, Fax Anyone with 2+ computers immediately thought about connecting them.
littlestymaar 9mo ago
> with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s. Late 1700 actually, and war was indeed a key motivation for the deployment of the Télégraphe Chappe.
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  See "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers" https://www.amazon.com/dp/162040592X https://www.amazon.com/dp/162040592X Télégraphe Chappe was a semaphore system using flags. It was not an electrical telegraph, nor was it binary.
  - littlestymaar 9mo ago
    It wasn't binary nor electrical, but it was already digital. Excluding it would be arbitrarily restrictive.
    - DrPhish 9mo ago
      Wouldn’t you also need to include the Ancient Greek phryctoriae military fire signalling system by that logic? It probably wasn’t the first, at that.

saratogacx 9mo ago

I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations. You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
pantalaimon 9mo ago
> You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory Then you have to also count the Z3 which predates the Colossus by 2 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

WD-42 9mo ago

That’s not the point of the person you are replying to. They are saying if we somehow come up with the tech that makes harnessing the sun a thing, the best we can still do is put a bunch of GPUs in space? It makes no sense.

trhway 9mo ago
>the best we can oh, we'll sure find a way to weaponize that energy for example - just imagine all those panels simultaneously turning their reflective back in a way to form gigantic mirror to focus reflected solar energy on your enemy, be that enemy in space or on the Earth/Moon/Mars ground. Basically space-scale version of 'death ray scyscrapper' https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wreaking-havoc-on-london-for-a-few-totally-insane-reasons-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wrea.... Back in the day the Star Wars program was intending to use nuclear explosions to power the lasers, i guess once all that solar for AI gets deployed in space we wouldn't need the explosions anymore. Interesting that such space deployment can deny access to space to anybody else, and that means that any competitive superpower has to rush to deploy similar scale system of their own. Space race v2.
- SllX 9mo ago
  Pick any Gundam series and watch the last 5 or 6 episodes, at least through the Gundam SEED/Destiny era. At least part of the plot will invariably include a space-based superweapon being deployed by one side of the war to end all wars and the the plot for a few episodes will include the other side engaging in a series of challenges to keep that from firing again and destroying it if possible.
rob74 9mo ago
It kinda does make sense if you consider that solar panels in space have been used for a very long time (to power satellites). However, getting the electricity they generate down to Earth is very complicated, so you end up having to use it in space, and one of few things that would make sense for that is indeed data centers, because getting the data to Earth is easier (and Elon already handily has a solution for that). However I'm curious how many solar panels you would need to power a typical data center. Are we talking something like a large satellite, or rather a huge satellite with ISS-size solar arrays bolted on? Getting rid of the copious amounts of heat that data centers generate might also be a challenge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control)...

vidarh 9mo ago

Yes, but isn't that pretty much the point of the person you replied to? We know that a lot of inventions were motivated by that, and so it is incredibly myopic to not pause and try to think through the likely far broader implications.

mike_hearn 9mo ago
OK, so what are they? Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own. At best, it makes it easier to change the grid to renewable power, if you ignore the intermittency problem that still exists even at huge scales. PV fabs aren't really reusable for other purposes though, and PV tech is pretty mature already, so it's not clear what scaling that up will do. Scaling rocketry has several fascinating implications but Elon already covered many of them in his blog post. Scaling AI - just read the HN front page every day ;) What are we missing here? Some combinatoric thing?
- mathw 9mo ago
  Scaling up PV production to the point where we could convert the entire Earth's electricity generation to solar is incredibly significant. Yes there's the problem of intermittency, varying sun availability and so forth - which is why solar will never provide 100% of our power and we'll also need grid-scale storage facilities and domestic batteries and all sorts of stuff - but just imagine being able to make that many panels in the first place! Literally solar on every roof, that's transformative. But sure, let's send it all to space to power questionable "AI" datacentres so we can make more fake nudes.
- vidarh 9mo ago
  Just scratching at the surface, assuming the increase in production capacity is only realistically possible if you can bring prices down (or this "project" would start to consume a proportion of economic output large enough to seem implausible), you can address the intermittency problem in several ways: Driving down the cost makes massive overprovision a means of reducing the intermittency because you will be able to cover demand at proportionally far lower output, which also means you'll be able to cover demands in far larger areas, even before looking at storage. But lower solar costs would also make storage more cost effective, since power cost will be a lower proportion of the amortised cost of the total system. Same with increasing transmission investments to allow smoothing load. Ever cost drop for solar will make it able to cover a larger proportion of total power demand, and we're nowhere near maximising viable total capacity even at current costs. A whole lot of industrial costs are also affected by energy prices. Drive down this down, and you should expect price drops in other areas as well as industrial uses where energy expensive processes are not cost-effective today. The geopolitical consequences of a dramatic acceleration of the drop in dependency on oil and gas would also take decades to play out. At the same time, if you can drive down the cost of energy by making solar so much cheaper, you also make earth-bound data centres more cost-competive, and the cost-advantage of space-bound data centres would be accordingly lower. I think it's an interesting idea to explore (but there's the whole issue of cooling being far harder in space), but I also think the effects would be far broader. By all means, if Musk wants to poor resources into making solar cheap enough for this kind of project to be viable, he should go ahead - maybe it'll consume enough of time to give him less time to plan a teenage edgelor - because I think the societal effects of driving down energy costs would generally be positive, AI or not, it just screams of being a justification for an xAI purchase done mostly for his personal financial engineering.

andrepd 9mo ago

Well computers are a funny story. The groundwork had been laid and the theoretical and engineering advances that would produce programmable digital computers were well underway in the 1930s. It would have happened very soon even if there was no war, but of course WWII happened right in 1939, so obviously computers made at that time had the purpose of calculating artillery paths or decrypting German messages. But it would be incorrect to say that military applications in WWII are the reason computers were invented.

bydlocoder 9mo ago

The only purely military thing is rockets and everything space related, there's just no way private businesses would've poured so much money into it Computers and internet being storage, processing and communication systems are clearly useful for civilian purposes

throw0101a 9mo ago

> Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. [citation needed] Because according to Bob Taylor, who initially got the funding for what became ARPANET: > Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge. > Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. When* Time magazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... § Prologue > 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. […] * Wizards § Chapter 1 The first four IMPs were UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah. Then BBN, MIT, RAND, System Development Corp., and Harvard. Next Lincoln Laboratory and Stanford, and by the end of 1970 Carnegie-Mellon University and Case Western Reserve University. It was only "later in the 1970s" that command and control was considered more (Lukasik): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Debate_about_design_goals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Debate_about_design_go... But the first two people who get the project going, Taylor and Herzfeld, were about the efficient use of expensive computer resources for research. Look at the firs >dozen sites and they were about linking researchers: the first DoD site wasn't connected until 3-4 years after things go going, and there was nothing classified about it. MILNET didn't occur until 1984: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Operation