Strange but true. Arlington County placed a historical marker outside SA-14 yesterday, commemorating the fact that DOD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was located in that building from 1970 to 1975, the period during which ARPANET was created and the first e-mails were sent.
The concepts and technologies behind the internet - file transfer protocols, packet switching, Interface Message Processors, etc. - were worked out at many different places from MIT to UCLA. But it was the ARPA guys at humble 1400 Wilson Boulevard who had the seed money for that work, and the Cold War national defense mission of exploiting new technologies for military command and control networks that could survive a nuclear war. See this history of how and why ARPANET was built.
Beneath the main marker is this bit of authentic technological frontier gibberish:
Which is "ARPANET" spelled out in binary code.
6 comments:
TSB: I think you would like the new
"Area 51" book. The writer is superb
and her many sources are all newly liberated veterans of the projects there who have wanted to tell their stories. Most of the UFO theories have now been debunked! It is a mind boggler! gwb
Agreed. I'm in the (e-book) queue for it at my library.
Then again, I get most of my news from the the same place Chris Matthews gets his: The Daily Show!
gwb
TSB: Didn't you say Steve Clemons is your hero? I was going back to get more familiar with his views and came upon:Afghanistan War: What Richard Holbrooke Really Thought 5/17/11. As I said at the time, Obama and Hillary
jumped in immediately after his death
to change his last words... thus throwing him under the bus. I think history will remember this as a fatal moment for US foreign policy.
gwb
I don't know about "hero" but I link to him at The Washington Note. He's helping Holbrooke's widow Kati Marton publicize H's actual position on what our Afghanistan policy ought to be. He left plenty of papers that should set the record straight.
When the record is clear I suspect it will be clear the politicians wouldn't listen to Holbrooke.(They favored Petreaus)
Reading Dakota is interesting and entertaining. He casts a light on the futility of our efforts in Afghanistan. Juan Cole says there are only 300 Al Quaeda in Yemen? gwb
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