Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
20 Paul Baran's diagram of centralized, decentralized and distributed networks,
reproduced from his famous RAND paper 'On Distributed Communication', 1964.
small network, named ARPANET, was the basis of the future
Internet.
In
, soon after the implementation of the ARPANET, the
Mansfield Amendment to military procurement authorization was
passed by the
1970
Congress, partly as a response to Vietnam. In effect
this limited Defense Department support for research, through
bodies such as ARPA, to projects directly related to defence. This
meant that the 'pure' research initiatives into computer applications,
such as those described above, could no longer be funded. ARPA
later returned to similar kinds of research, particularly in relation
to the Strategic Defense Initiative, the SDI, otherwise known as
'Star Wars', the Reagan-administration project to build a defensive
shield of rapid missile response to nuclear attack around the
us
,
a plan as ideologically potent and practically useless as SAGE.
Elsewhere, the immediate effect of the Mansfield Amendment
was dramatic, at least as far as computer research was concerned.
DOD computer research funding dropped to nothing, and was
not made up adequately from elsewhere in the government. One
result of this was that many of the brightest researchers from
us
