SummaryAbout the authors and the methodologyAssessment and commentsESD.83 – Seminar in Engineering Systems DivisionFall 2001Book Review #1:Transforming Computer Technology:Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986(Arthur Norberg and Judy O’Neill, John Hopkins)by Pedro FerreiraSummaryArthur Norberg and Judy O’Neill, with contributions from Kerry Freedman, present astudy of how computer research-support programs in the Department of Defense (DoD)were organized and developed over the years since the 1960s up to the 1980s. Theyillustrate the partnerships between the DoD and academic institutions, particularly theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) andStanford University. They focus the analysis on one of the premier research-supportagencies of the DoD, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of theDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). They describe the origins of theoffice, its growth and management strategies, the interactions with the R&D community,its most representative programs and its military-related mission.1In the early 1960s, ARPA (later called DARPA) was born from an effort to rationalizeR&D at different levels within the DoD and to stimulate new elements in the frontier oftechnology development in response to Sputnik. ARPA’s mission throughout time wasprimarily related to embracing high-risk R&D projects related to military. Along theselines, ARPA was associated with nuclear test detection, missiles, satellites and materials.The IPTO was born in 1962 in this context and aimed at fulfilling the desire of universityresearchers eager to investigate new computing techniques. Most notably, the IPTOfostered R&D in the fields of time-sharing, networking, graphics, artificial intelligence,parallel architectures and very large scale integration (VLSI) components.The IPTO mission was to a large degree defined by the vision and research agenda of itsdirectors. This fact is key in the methodology used in this book. The main sources for theauthors were documents on file provided by the Office and interviews with these peopleand others, namely project managers, directly related to the IPTO. IPTO’s directors were,in chronological order, Joseph Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Robert Taylor, LawrenceRoberts, David Russell, Robert Kahn and Samuel Amarel. In one way or the other, theyhave all been linked to major research universities in the US and were part of theCambridge-Boston technical community. These men influenced IPTO’s and evenDARPA’s research directions towards fundamental research in computer science. Thisincluded research in advanced network concepts for communications, development of anexperimental system to evaluate new ideas for command and control technologies andwork on advanced digital components.In the central chapters of this book, the authors go over the major developments in time-sharing, networking, graphics and artificial intelligence. They describe the majortechnological breakthroughs, the role of the program managers, the interaction of theIPTO with the research community and the budgeting and contracting schemes used forrisky R&D projects. The last chapter in the book sums up the impact of the IPTO effortsthroughout the years, in terms of serving the DoD and the Nation. 2In this last chapter, the authors argue that IPTO influenced decisively the development ofthe DoD and shaped the computer science community in a very particular way. First,IPTO influenced the military. IPTO’s directors provided a military context for R&D incomputer science and fostered the application of the results obtained to the DoD goals.Second, IPTO influenced computer technologies in general. Although most of projectswhere military-based, there was always a sense of generality and broader application ofthe knowledge raised and results obtained. That is clear today, after so many technologieshave spilled to the society (e.g. the Internet, which came from the advances achieved inwide-area networking).Finally, IPTO revolutionized the computing R&D infrastructure extending it beyond asmall number of institutions that were in the R&D frontline in the 1960s such as the RandCorporation and MIT’s Lincoln Labs. Many projects have been developed aimed atbringing together researchers from different disciplines together for the purpose ofsolving common problems and reaping the advantages of applying research problem-solving techniques from one field to another. In fact, this rationale has been transportedup to the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was developed to exactly establish asearchable and interconnected worldwide knowledge-base for R&D.In sum, the book drives the reader through the accelerated pace of technological changein computer science and allows the reader to go beyond the episodes described and makethe bridge between them and today’s world helping him understanding the origins andarchitecture of the information age.About the authors and the methodologyThe authors are affiliated with the Charles Babbage Institute, particularly, ArthurNorberg, who is the director of the Institute. His background is in Physics and he has aPh.D. in History of Science and Technology. The Charles Babbage Institute is a historicalresearch center and archives dedicated to promoting study of the history of informationtechnology and its impact on society.3The staff at the Institute is mainly composed by historians of technology, who are verygood researchers at conducting oral histories. According to the Institute’s mission, oralhistory is an exceptional research tool that uniquely illuminates about the topic of study.However, interviews need to be double checked with printable sources for consistencyand coherence. This is exactly what the authors did in this book. They have interviewedthe Directors of IPTO and project managers of the major projects developed and theyhave crossed the information obtained from these interviews with documents provided byARPA. Following this methodology, they have written a very good and comprehensivebook about the history of computer science.Assessment and commentsThe book is very interesting and unusual. The authors relied on the fact that the projectsconducted at the IPTO were