Newman.es@Xerox.ARPA (04/13/84)
From: Ron Newman <Newman.es@Xerox.ARPA> Excerpted from an interview in the April 1984 issue of ST.Mac magazine (Softalk's magazine for the Macintosh). All [bracketed phrases] are as in the original. Alan: Things haven't been the same in computer science since two things happened. The awful thing that happened was the Mansfield amendment in 1969. The amendment was a congressional reaction to pressure from the population about the Vietnam war, mostly uninformed pressure. What it did was force all military funding to be put under the scrutiny of Congress and to be diverted only to military-type things. All of a sudden, everything was different at ARPA [the Advanced Research Projects Agency]. Q: ARPA became DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) at that point? Alan: ARPA became DARPA. The last good thing to be done had already been funded, which was the Arpanet [a network of communicating computers around the world that allows scientists to send messages to each other]. That was finished in 1970. That was the end of ARPA funders [program directors] being drawn from the ARPA community. During the golden age at ARPA, the funding was much less than it is now, but it was wide open. Q: More creative work was done? Alan: Yeah. Their whole theory--partially because the managers of ARPA were scientists themselves--was "we fund people, not projects. If we can understand what these guys are doing, we should probably be off doing it ourselves. We'll just dump half this money for three years and take our lumps." They took percentages, like you have to in real research. And, God, did they get some great stuff! ~~~~End of excerpt~~~~~ Alan makes lots of other brash statements in this article too. I'll leave you with just this one: "I'd just as soon send all the engineers around here in Silicon Valley to the Outback of Australia until they have read something like 'The Federalist Papers' or Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' or *something*, for God's sake....what they're doing is actually vandalizing an entire generation of kids by acting as though things like Basic have value."