Information Technology Reference
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defence-funded departments gravitated towards the possibilities
offered by commercial research, for example in the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center. The Mansfield Amendment represented the end
of a golden era of government-funded computer research.
21 Hand-drawn map of ARPANET
(the predecessor of the Internet) in
1969, showing the first four nodes.
cybernetics and computing in civilian life
The above might suggest that research into and use of Cybernetics
and computing was entirely the preserve of the government and
the military. But while it is true that much of the research into
computing did, at first, take place either in military or government
establishments by virtue of funding from such bodies, the methods
of organization suggested by Cybernetics and made possible by
computers soon migrated from the military to civilian life. Such
discourses of control were congenial to those involved with ratio-
nalizing industrial manufacture. Frederick Taylor and others had
already developed powerful principles for the rationalization of the
labour process at the beginning of the century, followed by auto-
mation and mechanical control, introduced after the First World
War, in particular by Henry Ford in the car industry. In the period
