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Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research (1999)

Chapter: 4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review

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Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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4
The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review

Rather than a single, overarching framework of support, federal funding for research in computing has been managed by a set of agencies and offices that carry the legacies of the historical periods in which they were created. Crises such as World War II, Korea, Sputnik, Vietnam, the oil shocks, and concerns over national competitiveness have all instigated new modes of government support. Los Alamos National Laboratory, for example, a leader in supercomputing, was created by the Manhattan Project and became part of the Department of Energy. The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation emerged in the wake of World War II to continue the successful contributions of wartime science. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are products of the Cold War, created in response to the launch of Sputnik to regain the nation's technological leadership. The National Bureau of Standards, an older agency, was transformed into the National Institute of Standards and Technology in response to recent concerns about national competitiveness. Each organization's style, mission, and importance have changed over time; yet each organization profoundly reflects the process of its development, and the overall landscape is the result of numerous layers of history.

Understanding these layers is crucial for discussing the role of the federal government in computing research. This chapter briefly sets out a history of the federal government's programmatic involvement in computing research since 1945, distinguishing the various layers in the his-

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

torical eras in which they were first formed. The objective is to identify the changing role the government has played in these different historical periods, discuss the changing political and technological environment in which federal organizations have acted, and draw attention to the multiplicity, diversity, and flexibility of public-sector programs that have stimulated and underwritten the continuing steam of U.S. research in computing and communications since World War II. In fulfilling this charge, the chapter reviews a number of prominent federal research programs that exerted profound influence on the evolving computing industry. These programs are illustrative of the effects of federal funding on the industry at different times. Other programs, too numerous to describe in this chapter, undoubtedly played key roles in the history of the computing industry but are not considered here.

1945-1960: Era of Government Computers

In late 1945, just a few weeks after atomic bombs ended World War II and thrust the world into the nuclear age, digital electronic computers began to whir. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), built at the University of Pennsylvania and funded by the Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, was America's first such machine. The following 15 years saw electronic computing grow from a laboratory technology into a routine, useful one. Computing hardware moved from the ungainly and delicate world of vacuum tubes and paper tape to the reliable and efficient world of transistors and magnetic storage. The 1950s saw the development of key technical underpinnings for widespread computing: cheap and reliable transistors available in large quantities, rotating magnetic drum and disk storage, magnetic core memory, and beginning work in semiconductor packaging and miniaturization, particularly for missiles. In telecommunications, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) introduced nationwide dialing and the first electronic switching systems at the end of the decade. A fledgling commercial computer industry emerged, led by International Business Machines (IBM) (which built its electronic computer capability internally) and Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand), which purchased Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950 and Engineering Research Associates in 1952. Other important participants included Bendix, Burroughs, General Electric (GE), Honeywell, Philco, Raytheon, and Radio Communications Authority (RCA).

In computing, the technical cutting edge, however, was usually pushed forward in government facilities, at government-funded research centers, or at private contractors doing government work. Government funding accounted for roughly three-quarters of the total computer field.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

A survey performed by the Army Ballistics Research Laboratory in 1957, 1959, and 1961 lists every electronic stored-program computer in use in the country (the very possibility of compiling such a list says a great deal about the community of computing at the time). The surveys reveal the large proportion of machines in use for government purposes, either by federal contractors or in government facilities (Weik, 1955, pp. 57-61; Flamm, 1988).

The Government's Early Role

Before 1960, government—as a funder and as a customer—dominated electronic computing. Federal support had no broad, coherent approach, however, arising somewhat ad hoc in individual federal agencies. The period was one of experimentation, both with the technology itself and with diverse mechanisms for federal support. From the panoply of solutions, distinct successes and failures can be discerned, from both scientific and economic points of view. After 1960, computing was more prominantly recognized as an issue for federal policy. The National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences issued surveys and reports on the field.

If government was the main driver for computing research and development (R&D) during this period, the main driver for government was the defense needs of the Cold War. Events such as the explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 and the Korean War in the 1950s heightened international tensions and called for critical defense applications, especially command-and-control and weapons design. It is worth noting, however, that such forces did not exert a strong influence on telecommunications, an area in which most R&D was performed within AT&T for civilian purposes. Long-distance transmission remained analog, although digital systems were in development at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. Still, the newly emergent field of semiconductors was largely supported by defense in its early years. During the 1950s, the Department of Defense (DOD) supported about 25 percent of transistor research at Bell Laboratories (Flamm, 1988, p. 16; Misa, 1985).

However much the Cold War generated computer funding, during the 1950s dollars and scale remained relatively small compared to other fields, such as aerospace applications, missile programs, and the Navy's Polaris program (although many of these programs had significant computing components, especially for operations research and advanced management techniques). By 1950, government investment in computing amounted to $15 million to $20 million per year.

All of the major computer companies during the 1950s had significant components of their R&D supported by government contracts of some

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

type. At IBM, for example, federal contracts supported more than half of the R&D and about 35 percent of R&D as late as 1963 (only in the late 1960s did this proportion of support trail off significantly, although absolute amounts still increased). The federal government supported projects and ideas the private sector would not fund, either for national security, to build up human capital, or to explore the capabilities of a complex, expensive technology whose long-term impact and use was uncertain. Many federally supported projects put in place prototype hardware on which researchers could do exploratory work.

Establishment of Organizations

The successful development projects of World War II, particularly radar and the atomic bomb, left policymakers asking how to maintain the technological momentum in peacetime. Numerous new government organizations arose, attempting to sustain the creative atmosphere of the famous wartime research projects and to enhance national leadership in science and technology. Despite Vannevar Bush's efforts to establish a new national research foundation to support research in the nation's universities, political difficulties prevented the bill from passing until 1950, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) did not become a significant player in computing until later in that decade. During the 15 years immediately after World War II, research in computing and communications was supported by mission agencies of the federal government, such as DOD, the Department of Energy (DOE), and NASA. In retrospect, it seems that the nation was experimenting with different models for supporting this intriguing new technology that required a subtle mix of scientific and engineering skill.

Military Research Offices

Continuity in basic science was provided primarily by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), created in 1946 explicitly to perpetuate the contributions scientists made to military problems during World War II. In computing, the agency took a variety of approaches simultaneously. First, it supported basic intellectual and mathematical work, particularly in numerical analysis. These projects proved instrumental in establishing a sound mathematical basis for computer design and computer processing. Second, ONR supported intellectual infrastructure in the infant field of computing, sponsoring conferences and publications for information dissemination. Members of ONR participated in founding the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947.

ONR's third approach to computing was to sponsor machine design

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

and construction. It ordered a computer for missile testing through the National Bureau of Standards from Raytheon, which became known as the Raydac machine, installed in 1952 (Rees, 1982). ONR supported Whirlwind, MIT's first digital computer and progenitor of real-time command-and-control systems (Redmond and Smith, 1980). John von Neumann built a machine with support from ONR and other agencies at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, known as the IAS computer (Goldstine, 1972; Rees, 1982). The project produced significant advances in computer architecture, and the design was widely copied by both government and industrial organizations.

Other military services created offices on a model similar to that of ONR. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research was established in 1950 to manage U.S. Air Force R&D activities. Similarly, the U.S. Army established the Army Research Office to manage and promote Army programs in science and technology.

National Bureau of Standards

Arising out of its role as arbiter of weights and measures, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) had long had its own laboratories and technical expertise and had long served as a technical advisor to other government agencies. In the immediate postwar years, NBS sought to expand its advisory role and help U.S. industry develop wartime technology for commercial purposes. NBS, through its National Applied Mathematics Laboratory, acted as a kind of expert agent for other government agencies, selecting suppliers and overseeing construction and delivery of new computers. For example, NBS contracted for the three initial Univac machines—the first commercial, electronic, digital, stored-program computers—one for the Census Bureau and two for the Air Materiel Command.

NBS also got into the business of building machines. When the Univac order was plagued by technical delays, NBS built its own computer in-house. The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) was built for the Air Force and dedicated in 1950, the first operational, electronic, stored-program computer in this country. NBS built a similar machine, the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) for the Navy on the West Coast (Huskey, 1980). Numerous problems were run on SEAC, and the computer also served as a central facility for diffusing expertise in programming to other government agencies. Despite this significant hardware, however, NBS's bid to be a government center for computing expertise ended in the mid-1950s. Caught up in postwar debates over science policy and a controversy over battery additives, NBS research

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

funding was radically reduced, and NBS lost its momentum in the field of computing (Akera, 1996).

Atomic Energy Commission

Nuclear weapons design and research have from the beginning provided impetus to advances in large-scale computation. The first atomic bombs were designed only with desktop calculators and punched-card equipment, but continued work on nuclear weapons provided some of the earliest applications for the new electronic machines as they evolved. The first computation job run on the ENIAC in 1945 was an early calculation for the hydrogen bomb project ''Super.'' In the late 1940s, the Los Alamos National Laboratory built its own computer, MANIAC, based on von Neumann's design for the Institute for Advanced Study computer at Princeton, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) funded similar machines at Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Seidel, 1996; Goldstine, 1980).

In addition to building their own computers, the AEC laboratories were significant customers for supercomputers. The demand created by AEC laboratories for computing power provided companies with an incentive to design more powerful computers with new designs. In the early 1950s, IBM built its 701, the Defense Calculator, partly with the assurance that Los Alamos and Livermore would each buy at least one. In 1955, the AEC laboratory at Livermore, California, commissioned Remington Rand to design and build the Livermore Automatic Research Computer (LARC), the first supercomputer. The mere specification for LARC advanced the state of the art, as the bidding competition required the use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes (MacKenzie, 1991). IBM developed improved ferrite-core memories and supercomputer designs with funding from the National Security Agency, and designed and built the Stretch supercomputer for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, beginning it in 1956 and installing it in 1961. Seven more Stretch supercomputers were built. Half of the Stretch supercomputers sold were used for nuclear weapon research and design (Pugh, 1995; pp. 222-223).

The AEC continued to specify and buy newer and faster supercomputers, including the Control Data 6600, the STAR 100, and the Cray 1 (although developed without AEC funds), practically ensuring a market for continued advancements (Pugh, 1995; p. 192). AEC and DOE laboratories also developed much of the software used in high-performance computing including operating systems, numerical analysis software, and matrix evaluation routines (Flamm, 1987, p. 82). In addition to stimulating R&D in industry, the AEC laboratories also developed a large talent pool on which the computer industry and academia could draw. In fact,

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

the head of IBM's Applied Science Department, Cuthbert Hurd, came directly to IBM in 1949 from the AEC's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Hurd, 1994). Physicists worked on national security problems with government support providing demand, specifications, and technical input, as well as dollars, for industry to make significant advances in computing technology.

Private Organizations

Not all the new organizations created by the government to support computing were public. A number of new private organizations also sprang up with innovative new charters and government encouragement that held prospects of initial funding support. In 1956, at the request of the Air Force, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created Project Lincoln, now known as the Lincoln Laboratory, with a broad charter to study problems in air defense to protect the nation from nuclear attack. The Lincoln Laboratory then oversaw the construction of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air-defense system (Box 4.1) (Bashe et al., 1986, p. 262). In 1946, the Air Force and Douglas Aircraft created a joint venture, Project RAND, to study intercontinental warfare. In the following year RAND separated from Douglas and became the independent, nonprofit RAND Corporation.

RAND worked only for the Air Force until 1956, when it began to diversify to other defense and defense-related contractors, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Atomic Energy Commission, and provided, for a time, what one researcher called "in some sense the world's largest installation for scientific computing [in 1950]."1 RAND specialized in developing computer systems, such as the Johnniac, based on the IAS computer, which made RAND the logical source for the programming on SAGE. While working on SAGE, RAND trained hundreds of programmers, eventually leading to the spin-off of RAND's Systems Development Division and Systems Training Program into the Systems Development Corporation. Computers made a major impact on the systems analysis and game theoretic approaches that RAND and other similar think tanks used in attempts to model nuclear and conventional warfighting strategies.

Engineering Research Associates (ERA) represented yet another form of government support: the private contractor growing out of a single government agency. With ERA, the Navy effectively privatized its wartime cryptography organization and was able to maintain civilian expertise through the radical postwar demobilization. ERA was founded in St. Paul, Minnesota, in January 1946 by two engineers who had done cryptography for the Navy and their business partners (Cohen and Tomash,

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

BOX 4.1 Project Whirlwind and SAGE

Two closely connected computing projects, Whirlwind and SAGE, demonstrate the influence of federal research and development programs during the early days of computing. They not only generated technical knowledge and human resources, but they also forged a unique relationship among government, universities, and industry. The Whirlwind computer was originally intended to be part of a general-purpose flight simulator, but it evolved into the first real-time, general-purpose digital computer. SAGE, an air-defense system designed to protect against enemy bombers, made several important contributions to computing in areas as diverse as computer graphics, time-sharing, digital communications, and ferrite-core memories. Together, these two projects shared a symbiotic relationship that strengthened the early computer industry.

Whirlwind originated in 1944 as part of the Navy's Airplane Stability and Control Analyzer (ASCA) project. At that time, the Navy made extensive use of flight simulators to test new aircraft designs and train pilots; however, each new aircraft design required a separate computer specially created for its particular design. ASCA was intended to negate the need to build individual computers for the flight simulators by serving as a general-purpose simulator that could emulate any design programmed into it. Jay Forrester, the leader of the computer portion of the ASCA project, soon recognized that analog computers (which were typically used on aircraft simulators) would not be fast enough to operate the trainer in real time. Learning of work in electronic digital computing as part of ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania, Forrester began investigating the potential for real-time digital computers for Whirlwind. By early 1946, Forrester decided to pursue the digital route, expanding the goal of the Whirlwind program from building a generalizable aircraft simulator to designing a real-time, general-purpose digital computer that could serve many functions other than flight simulation.

Pursuing a digital computer required dramatic increases in computing speeds and reliability, both of which hinged on development of improved computer memory—an innovation that was also needed to handle large amounts of data about incoming airplanes. Mercury delay-line memories, which used sonic pulses to record information and were being pursued by several other research centers, were too slow for the machine Forrester envisioned. He decided instead to use electrostatic storage tubes in which bits of information could be stored as an electrical charge and which claimed read-and-write times of a few milliseconds. Such tubes proved to be expensive, limited in storage capacity, and unreliable. Looking for a new memory alternative, Forrester came across a new magnetic ceramic called Deltamax and began working on the first magnetic core memory, a project to which he later assigned a graduate student, Bill Papian.

The expansion of Whirlwind's technical objectives resulted in expanding project budgets that eventually undermined support for the project. Forrester originally planned Whirlwind as a 2-year, $875,000 program, but he increased his cost estimate for the Whirlwind computer itself to $1.9 million in March 1946 and to almost $3 million by 1947 (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996, pp. 161-163). By 1949, Whirlwind made up nearly 65 percent of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) mathematics research budget and almost 10 percent of ONR's entire contract research

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

budget (Edwards, 1996, p. 79). As a part of a general Department of Defense initiative to centralize computer research in 1951, ONR planned to reduce Whirlwind's annual budget from $1.15 million to $250 thousand in 1951, threatening the viability of the project (Edwards, 1996, p. 91). Support for the project was salvaged only after George Valley, Jr., a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and chairman of the Air Defense System Engineering Committee, realized that Whirlwind might play a critical role in a new air-defense program, SAGE, and convinced the Air Force to provide additional funding for the project, thereby adding to its credibility.

In 1949, Valley began lobbying the Air Force to improve U.S. air-defense capability in the face of the nation's growing vulnerability to Soviet bombers (Freeman, 1995, p. 2). Valley was put in charge of the Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee to investigate possible solutions. The resulting Project Charles Summer Study Group recommended that the Air Force ask MIT to build a laboratory to carry out the experimental and field research necessary to develop a system to safeguard the United States (Freeman, 1995, p. 6). In response, MIT created Project Lincoln, now known as Lincoln Laboratory, to create the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, system.

Through SAGE, the Air Force became the major sponsor of Whirlwind, enabling the project to move toward completion. By late 1951, a prototype ferrite-core memory system was demonstrated, and by 1953, the Whirlwind's entire memory was replaced with core memory boasting a 9-microsecond access time, effectively ending the research phase of the program. The Air Force subsequently purchased production versions of the computer (designed in a cooperative effort between MIT and IBM) to equip each of its 23 Direction Centers. Each center had two IBM-manufactured versions of Whirlwind: one operating live and one operating in standby mode for additional reliability. The machines accepted input from over 100 different information sources (typically from ground, air, and seaborne radars) and displayed relevant information on cathode-ray-tube displays for operators to track and identify aircraft.

The first SAGE Direction Center was activated in 1958, and deployment continued until 1963, when final deployment of 23 centers was completed at an estimated cost of $8 billion to $12 billion. Although a technical success, SAGE was already outdated by the time of its completion. The launch of Sputnik shifted the most feared military threat to the United States from long-range bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles. SAGE command centers continued to operate into the middle of the 1980s but with a reduced urgency.

All told, ONR spent roughly $3.6 million on Whirlwind, the Air Force, $13.8 million. In return, Whirlwind and SAGE generated a score of innovations. On the hardware side, Whirlwind and SAGE pioneered magnetic-core memory, digital phone-line transmission and modems, the light pen (one of the first graphical user interfaces), and duplexed computers. In software, they pioneered use of real-time software; concepts that later evolved into assemblers, compilers, and interpreters; software diagnosis programs; time-shared operating systems; structured program modules; table-driven software; and data description techniques. Five years after its introduction in Whirlwind, ferrite-core memory replaced every other type of com

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

puter memory, and remained the dominant form of computer memory until 1973. Royalties to MIT from nongovernment sales amounted to $25 million, as MIT licensed the technology broadly.1

In addition, SAGE accelerated the transfer of these technologies throughout the nascent computer industry. While Lincoln Laboratory was given primary responsibility for SAGE, the project also involved several private firms such as IBM, RAND, Systems Development Corporation (the spin-off from RAND), Burroughs, Western Electric, RCA, and AT&T.2 Through this complex relationship between academia, industry, and the military, SAGE technologies worked their way into commercial products and helped establish the industry leaders. SAGE was a driving force behind the formation of the American computer and electronics industry (Freeman, 1995, p. 33). IBM built 56 computers for SAGE, earning over $500 million, which helped contribute to its becoming the world's largest computer manufacturer (Edwards, 1996, pp. 101-102; Freeman, 1995, p. 33). At its peak, between 7,000 and 8,000 IBM employees worked on the project. SAGE technology contributed substantially to the SABRE airline reservation system marketed by IBM in 1964, which later became the backbone of the airline industry (Edwards, 1996, p. 102). Kenneth Olsen, who worked on Whirlwind before founding Digital Equipment Corporation, called Whirlwind the first minicomputer and states that his company was based entirely on Whirlwind technology (Old Associates, 1981, p. 23).

SAGE also contributed to formalizing the programming profession. While developing software for the system, the RAND Corporation spun off the Systems Development Corporation (SDC) to handle the software for SAGE. SDC trained thousands of programmers who eventually moved into the workforce. Numerous computer engineers from both IBM and SDC started their own firms with the knowledge they acquired from SAGE.

SAGE also established an influential precedent for organizational management. Lincoln Laboratory was structured in the same style as MIT had run the Radiation Laboratory during World War II, in that it had much less management involvement than other equivalent organizations. As a result, researchers had a large amount of freedom to pursue their own solutions to problems at hand. Norman Taylor, one of the key individuals who designed SAGE at Lincoln Laboratory credited the management style for the projects' successes:

I think Bob [Everett] put his finger on one important thing: the freedom to do something without approval from top management. Take the case of the 65,000 word memory. . . . We built that big memory, and we didn't go to the steering committee to get approval for it. We didn't go up there and say, "Now, here's what we ought to do, it's going to cost this many million dollars, it's going to take us this long, and you must give us approval for it." We just had a pocket of money that was for advanced research. We didn't tell anybody what it was for; we didn't have to. (Freeman, 1995, p. 20)

This management style contrasted with the more traditional bureaucratic style of most American corporations of the time. It was subsequently adopted by Digital Equipment Corporation (under Kenneth Olsen's leadership) and eventually imitated

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

by many—if not most—of the information technology firms that dot the suburban Boston and Silicon Valley landscapes. Although not the first to pioneer this management style and the organizational ethos it engendered, Lincoln Laboratory had demonstrated its functionality in large computing systems development.

  • 1  

    MIT licensed the technology for core memories to several computer companies—IBM, Univac, RCA, General Electric, Burroughs, NCR, Lockheed, and Digital Equipment Corporation—and memory suppliers, including Ampex, Fabri-TEk, Electronic Memory & Magnetics, Data Products, General Ceramics, and Ferroxcube. See Old Associates (1981), Figure 2 and p. 3.

  • 2  

    Although AT&T is a private company, much of its research was supported through a tax on customers. Hence, its research is often considered quasi-public.

1979). The Navy moved its Naval Computing Machine Laboratory from Dayton to St. Paul, and ERA essentially became the laboratory (Tomash, 1973; Parker 1985, 1986). ERA did some research, but it primarily worked on task-oriented, cost-plus contracts. As one participant recalled, "It was not a university atmosphere. It was 'Build stuff. Make it work. How do you package it? How do you fix it? How do you document it?'" (Tomash, 1973). ERA built a community of engineering skill, which became the foundation of the Minnesota computer industry. In 1951, for example, the company hired Seymour Cray for his first job out of the University of Minnesota (ERA, 1950; Cohen, 1983; Tomash 1973).

As noted earlier, the RAND Corporation had contracted in 1955 to write much of the software for SAGE owing to its earlier experience in air defense and its large pool of programmers. By 1956, the Systems Training Program of the RAND Corporation, the division assigned to SAGE, was larger than the rest of the corporation combined, and it spun off into the nonprofit Systems Development Corporation (SDC). SDC played a significant role in computer training. As described by one of the participants, "Part of SDC's nonprofit role was to be a university for programmers. Hence our policy in those days was not to oppose the recruiting of our personnel and not to match higher salary offers with an SDC raise." By 1963, SDC had trained more than 10,000 employees in the field of computer systems. Of those, 6,000 had moved to other businesses across the country (Baum, 1981, pp. 47-51).

Observations

In retrospect, the 1950s appear to have been a period of institutional and technological experimentation. This diversity of approaches, while it

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

brought the field and the industry from virtually nothing to a tentative stability, was open to criticisms of waste, duplication of effort, and ineffectiveness caused by rivalries among organizations and their funding sources. The field was also driven largely by the needs of government agencies, with relatively little input from computer-oriented scientists at the highest levels. Criticism remained muted during the decade when the military imperatives of the Cold War seemed to dominate all others, but one event late in the decade opened the entire system of federal research support to scrutiny: the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Attacks mounted that the system of R&D needed to be changed, and they came not only from the press and the politicians but also from scientists themselves.

1960-1970: Supporting a Continuing Revolution

Several significant events occurred to mark a transition from the infancy of information technology to a period of diffusion and growth. Most important of these was the launching of Sputnik in 1957, which sent convulsions through the U.S. science and engineering world and redoubled efforts to develop new technology. President Eisenhower elevated scientists and engineers to the highest levels of policy making. Thus was inaugurated what some have called the golden age of U.S. research policy. Government support for information technology took off in the 1960s and assumed its modern form. The Kennedy administration brought a spirit of technocratic reform to the Pentagon and the introduction of systems analysis and computer-based management to all aspects of running the military. Many of the visions that set the research agendas for the following 15 years (and whose influence remains today) were set in the early years of the decade.

Maturing of a Commercial Industry

Perhaps most important, the early 1960s can be defined as the time when the commercial computer industry became significant on its own, independent of government funding and procurement. Computerized reservation systems began to proliferate, particularly the IBM/American Airlines SABRE system, based in part on prior experience with military command-and-control systems (such as SAGE). The introduction of the IBM System/360 in 1964 solidified computer applications in business, and the industry itself, as significant components of the economy (Pugh, 1995).

This newly vital industry, dominated by "Snow White" (IBM) and the "Seven Dwarfs" (Burroughs, Control Data, GE, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Sperry Rand), came to have several effects on government-supported R&D. First, and most obvious, some companies (mostly IBM) became

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

large enough to conduct their own in-house research. IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center was dedicated in 1961. Its director, Emanuel Piore, was recruited from ONR, and he emphasized basic research. Such laboratories not only expanded the pool of researchers in computing and communications but also supplied a source of applied research that allowed or, conversely, pushed federal support to focus increasingly on the longest-term, riskiest ideas and on problems unique to government. Second, the industry became a growing employer of computer professionals, providing impetus to educational programs at universities and making computer science and engineering increasingly attractive career paths to talented young people.

These years saw turning points in telecommunications as well. In 1962, AT&T launched the first active communications satellite, Telstar, which transmitted the first satellite-relay telephone call and the first live transatlantic television signal. That same year, a less-noticed but equally significant event occurred when AT&T installed the first commercial digital-transmission system. Twenty-four digital speech channels were time multiplexed onto a repeatered digital transmission line operating at 1.5 megabits per second. In 1963, the first Stored Program Control electronic switching system was placed into service, inaugurating the use of digital computer technology for mainstream switching.

The 1960s also saw the emergence of the field called computer science, and several important university departments were founded during the decade, at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon in 1965 and at MIT in 1968. Hardware platforms had stabilized enough to support a community of researchers who attacked a common set of problems. New languages proliferated, often initiated by government and buoyed by the needs of commercial industry. The Navy had sponsored Grace Hopper and others during the 1950s to develop automatic programming techniques that became the first compilers. John Backus and a group at IBM developed FORTRAN, which was distributed to IBM users in 1957. A team led by John McCarthy at MIT (with government support) began implementing LISP in 1958, and the language became widely used, particularly for artificial intelligence programming, in the early 1960s. In 1959, the Pentagon began convening a group of computer experts from government, academia, and industry to define common business languages for computers. The group published a specification in 1959, and by 1960 RCA and Remington Rand Univac had produced the first COBOL compilers (ACM Sigplan, 1978). By the beginning of the 1960s, a number of computer languages, standard across numerous hardware platforms, were beginning to define programming as a task, as a profession, and as a challenging and legitimate subject of intellectual inquiry.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×
The Changing Federal Role

The forces driving government support changed during the 1960s. The Cold War remained a paramount concern, but to it were added the difficult conflict in Vietnam, the Great Society programs, and the Apollo program, inaugurated by President Kennedy's 1961 challenge. New political goals, new technologies, and new missions provoked changes in the federal agency population. Among these, two agencies became particularly important in computing: the new Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency

The founding of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958, a direct outgrowth of the Sputnik scare, had immeasurable impact on computing and communications. ARPA, specifically charged with preventing technological surprises like Sputnik, began conducting long-range, high-risk research. It was originally conceived as the DOD's own space agency, reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense in order to avoid interservice rivalry. Space, like computing, did not seem to fit into the existing military service structure.2 ARPA's independent status not only insulated it from established service interests but also tended to foster radical ideas and keep the agency tuned to basic research questions: when the agency-supported work became too much like systems development, it ran the risk of treading on the territory of a specific service.

ARPA's status as the DOD space agency did not last long. Soon after NASA's creation in 1958, ARPA retained essentially no role as a space agency. ARPA instead focused its energies on ballistic missile defense, nuclear test detection, propellants, and materials. It also established a critical organizational infrastructure and management style: a small, high-quality managerial staff, supported by scientists and engineers on rotation from industry and academia, successfully employing existing DOD laboratories and contracting procedures (rather than creating its own research facilities) to build solid programs in new, complex fields (Barber Associates, 1975). ARPA also emerged as an agency extremely sensitive to the personality and vision of its director.

ARPA's decline as a space agency raised questions about its role and character. A new director, Jack Ruina, answered the questions in no uncertain terms by cementing the agency's reputation as an elite, scientifically respected institution devoted to basic, long-term research projects. Ruina, ARPA's first scientist-director, took office at the same time as Kennedy and MacNamara in 1961, and brought a similar spirit to the agency. Ruina decentralized management at ARPA and began the tradi-

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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tion of relying heavily on independent office directors and program managers to run research programs. Ruina also valued scientific and technical merit above immediate relevance to the military. Ruina believed both of these characteristics—independence and intellectual quality—were critical to attracting the best people, both to ARPA as an organization and to ARPA-sponsored research (Barber Associates, 1975, Chapter V). Interestingly, ARPA's managerial success did not rely on innovative managerial techniques per se (such as the computerized project scheduling typical of the Navy's Polaris project) but rather on the creative use of existing mechanisms such as "no-year money," unsolicited proposals, sole-source procurement, and multiyear forward funding.

ARPA and Information Technology.

From the point of view of computing, the most important event at ARPA in the early 1960s, indeed in all of ARPA's history, was the establishment of the Information Processing Techniques Office, IPTO, in 1962. The impetus for this move came from several directions, including Kennedy's call a year earlier for improvements in command-and-control systems to make them "more flexible, more selective, more deliberate, better protected, and under ultimate civilian authority at all times" (Norberg and O'Neill, 1996, p. 10). Computing as applied to command and control was the ideal ARPA program—it had no clearly established service affinity; it was "a new area with relatively little established service interest and entailed far less constraint on ARPA's freedom of action," than more familiar technologies (Barber Associates, 1975, p. V-5). Ruina established IPTO to be devoted not to command and control but to the more fundamental problems in computing that would, eventually, contribute solutions.

Consistent with his philosophy of strong, independent, and scientific office managers, Ruina appointed J.C.R. Licklider to head IPTO. The Harvard-trained psychologist came to ARPA in October 1962, primarily to run its Command and Control Group. Licklider split that group into two discipline-oriented offices: Behavioral Sciences Office and IPTO. Licklider had had extensive exposure to the computer research of the time and had clearly defined his own vision of "man-computer symbiosis," which he had published in a landmark paper of 1960 by the same name. He saw human-computer interaction as the key, not only to command and control, but also to bringing together the then-disparate techniques of electronic computing to form a unified science of computers as tools for augmenting human thought and creativity (Licklider, 1988b, 1960). Licklider formed IPTO in this image, working largely independently of any direction from Ruina, who spent the majority of his time on higher-profile and higher-funded missile defense issues. Licklider's timing was opportune: the 1950s had produced a stable technology of digital com-

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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puter hardware, and the big systems projects had shown that programming these machines was a difficult but interesting problem in its own right. Now the pertinent questions concerned how to use ''this tremendous power. . . for other than purely numerical scientific calculations'' (Barber Associates, 1975).3 Licklider not only brought this vision to IPTO itself, but he also promoted it with missionary zeal to the research community at large. Licklider's and IPTO's success derived in large part from their skills at "selling the vision" in addition to "buying the research."

Another remarkable feature of IPTO, particularly during the 1960s, was its ability to maintain the coherent vision over a long period of time; the office director was able to handpick his successor. Licklider chose Ivan Sutherland, a dynamic young researcher he had encountered as a graduate student at MIT and the Lincoln Laboratory, to succeed him in 1964. Sutherland carried on Licklider's basic ideas and made his own impact by emphasizing computer graphics. Sutherland's own successor, Robert Taylor, came in 1966 from a job as a program officer at NASA and recalled, "I became heartily subscribed to the Licklider vision of interactive computing" (Taylor, 1989). While at IPTO, Taylor emphasized networking. The last IPTO director of the 1960s, Lawrence Roberts, came, like Sutherland, from MIT and Lincoln Laboratory, where he had worked on the early transistorized computers and had conducted ARPA research in both graphics and communications.

During the 1960s, ARPA and IPTO had more effect on the science and technology of computing than any other single government agency, sometimes raising concern that the research agenda for computing was being directed by military needs. IPTO's sheer size, $15 million in 1965, dwarfed other agencies such as ONR. Still, it is important to note, ONR and ARPA worked closely together; ONR would often let small contracts to researchers and serve as a talent agent for ARPA, which would then fund promising projects at larger scale. ARPA combined the best features of existing military research support with a new, lean administrative structure and innovative management style to fund high-risk projects consistently. The agency had the freedom to administer large block grants as well as multiple-year contracts, allowing it the luxury of a long-term vision to foster technologies, disciplines, and institutions. Further, the national defense motivation allowed IPTO to concentrate its resources on centers of scientific and engineering excellence (such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Stanford University) without regard for geographical distribution questions with which NSF had to be concerned. Such an approach helped to create university-based research groups with the critical mass and stability of funding needed to create significant advances in particular technical areas. But although it trained generations of young researchers in those areas, ARPA's funding style did little to help them pursue the

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

same lines of work at other universities. As an indirect and possibly unintended consequence, the research approaches and tools and the generic technologies developed under ARPA's patronage were disseminated more rapidly and widely, and so came to be applied in new nonmilitary conexts by the young M.S. and Ph.D. graduates who had been trained in that environment but could not expect to make their research careers within it.

ARPA's Management Style.

To evaluate research proposals, IPTO did not employ the peer-review process like NSF, but rather relied on internal reviews and the discretion of program managers as did ONR. These program managers, working under office managers such as Licklider, Sutherland, Taylor, and Roberts, came to have enormous influence over their areas of responsibility and became familiar with the entire field both personally and intellectually. They had the freedom and the resources to shape multiple R&D contracts into a larger vision and to stimulate new areas of inquiry. The education, recruiting, and responsibilities of these program managers thus became a critical parameter in the character and success of ARPA programs. ARPA frequently chose people who had training and research experience in the fields they would fund, and thus who had insight and opinions on where those fields should go.

To have such effects, the program managers were given enough funds to let a large enough number of contracts and to shape a coherent research program, with minimal responsibilities for managing staffs. Program budgets usually required only two levels of approval above the program manager: the director of IPTO and the director of ARPA. One IPTO member described what he called "the joy of ARPA . . . . You know, if a program manager has a good idea, he has got two people to convince that that is a good idea before the guy goes to work. He has got the director of his office and the director of ARPA, and that is it. It is such a short chain of command" (Taylor, 1989).

Part of ARPA's philosophy involved aiming at radical change rather than incremental improvement. As Robert Taylor put it, for example, incremental innovation would be taken care of by the services and their contractors, but, ARPA's aim was "an order of magnitude difference."4 ARPA identified good ideas and magnified them. This strategy often necessitated funding large, group-oriented projects and institutions rather than individuals. Taylor recalled, "I don't remember a single case where we ever funded a single individual's work. . . . The individual researcher who is just looking for support for his own individual work could [potentially] find many homes to support that work. So we tended not to fund those, because we felt that they were already pretty well covered. Instead, we funded larger groups—teams." NSF's peer-review process

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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worked well for individual projects, but was not likely to support large, team-oriented research projects. Nor did it, at this point in history, support entire institutions and research centers, like the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT. IPTO's style meshed with its emphasis on human-machine interaction, which it saw as fundamentally a systems problem and hence fundamentally team oriented. In Taylor's view, the university reward structure was much more oriented toward individual projects, so "systems research is most difficult to fund and manage in a university" (Taylor, 1989). This philosophy was apparent in ARPA's support of Project MAC, an MIT-led effort on time-shared computing (Box 4.2).

ARPA, with its clearly defined mission to support DOD technology, could also afford to be elitist in a way that NSF, with a broader charter to support the country's scientific research could not. "ARPA had no commitment, for example, to take geography into consideration when it funded work" (Taylor, 1989). Another important feature of ARPA's multi-year contracts was their stability, which proved critical for graduate students who could rely on funding to get them through their Ph.D. program. ARPA also paid particular attention to building communities of researchers and disseminating the results of its research, even beyond traditional publications. IPTO would hold annual meetings for its contract researchers at which results would be presented and debated. These meetings proved effective not only at advancing the research itself but also at providing valuable feedback for the program managers and helping to forge relationships between researchers in related areas. Similar conferences were convened for graduate students only, thus building a longer-term community of researchers. ARPA also put significant effort into getting the results of its research programs commercialized so that DOD could benefit from the development and expansion of a commercial industry for information technology. ARPA sponsored conferences that brought together researchers and managers from academia and industry on topics such as time-sharing, for example.

Much has been made of ARPA's management style, but it would be a mistake to conclude that management per se provided the keys to the agency's successes in computing. The key point about the style, in fact, was its light touch. Red tape was kept to a minimum, and project proposals were turned around quickly, frequently into multiple-year contracts. Typical DOD research contracts involved close monitoring and careful adherence to requirements and specifications. ARPA avoided this approach by hiring technically educated program managers who had continuing research interests in the fields they were managing. This reality counters the myth that government bureaucrats heavy-handedly selected R&D problems and managed the grants and contracts. Especially during the 1960s and 1970s, program managers and office directors were not

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

BOX 4.2 Project MAC and Computer Time-sharing

The development of computer time-sharing and the advent of minicomputers set the technological stage for the 1970s. Time-sharing systems divide computation power cyclically between many users over a network. Properly designed time-sharing computers can switch among processes quickly enough so that users do not recognize any delay, making it appear as though each user has the computer's full attention. Such systems took advantage of design and manufacturing peculiarities of mainframes that resulted in the power of a mainframe computer varying as the square of cost of the computer.1 Therefore, building one computer for twice the cost of a smaller machine created four times the power. Time-sharing systems took advantage of this phenomena by allowing several users to share a single larger computer instead of several smaller machines. Development of such systems emerged from the complementary efforts of industry, universities, and government. Key to these efforts were Project MAC and its predecessors, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation (NSF). While Project MAC was not responsible for the first time-sharing system, it played a significant role in the technology's development.

Project MAC was started by IPTO in 1963, with funding going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MAC stood for Man and Computer, Machine-Aided Cognition, and Multi-Access Computer. J.C.R. Licklider chose MIT as the site for Project MAC because of the large variety of computer disciplines being studied at MIT. Project MAC brought together, for example, Marvin Minsky's artificial intelligence work, Douglas Ross's computer-aided design systems, Herbert Teager's studies in languages and devices, and Martin Greenberger's work with human-machine systems. While the program was justified to the military as a command-and-control program, Licklider's goal was much broader. He sought "the possibility of a profound advance, which will be almost literally an advance in the way of thinking about computing." In an interview with the Charles Babbage Institute, Licklider said, "I wanted interactive computing, I wanted time-sharing. I wanted themes like: computers are as much for communication as they are for calculation" (Norberg and O'Neil, 1996, pp. 97-98). Project MAC would eventually receive $25 million in total from 1963 to 1970 (Reed et al., 1990, Chapter 19, p. 14).

The core of Project MAC involved the design of a time-sharing computer system. Project MAC was not the first time-sharing initiative, but it significantly pushed the state of the art. Time-sharing systems had previously been developed in the MIT Computation Center, at System Development Corporation, and at Bolt, Beranek and Newman. At first, Project MAC used the MIT Computation Center's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), which had been designed under a grant from NSF. The system was built on an IBM 7090/94 and became operational in 1961. This was the first system enabling users to write their own programs online (Reed et al., 1990, pp. 19-2 to 19-3). In 1964, CTSS was connected to 24 terminals across the MIT campus. Eventually, 160 terminals were in place and 30 could be in use at one time. However, the CTSS still could not provide as much power as researchers desired, and it lacked necessary data access security.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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Beginning in 1965, Project MAC began to create a second system with the help of General Electric and Bell Laboratories: MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), was completed in 1969 and would eventually support 1,000 terminals at MIT with 300 in use at any one time (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996, pp. 214-215). MULTICS also incorporated a multiuser file system and a complex virtual-memory system that allowed application programs to function as if available memory were much larger than the memory actually attached to the processor. It featured an automatically managed three-level memory system, controlled sharing and protection of data and programs accessed by multiple users, and the ability to reallocate its resources dynamically without interruption. MULTICS had a multiuser file system that allowed each user to work as if on an independent computer (Flamm, 1987, p. 58).

Project MAC led to many advances beyond time-sharing. MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory received $1 million in funding through Project MAC for work to further the objectives of interactive computing (of which time-sharing was an integral part) and intelligent assistance (Norberg and O'Neill, 1996). Funds also went toward research in input/output devices. One of the earliest computer-aided design systems, KLUDGE, was developed through Project MAC. Project MAC's ability to compose and edit programs and documents online laid the groundwork for word processors and interactive programming. The idea for the spreadsheet, later popularized by Lotus 123 and subsequently Microsoft's Excel, also came from two students who worked on Project MAC. This idea spurred development of the first spreadsheet on the personal computer, VisiCalc, from Software Arts. The first real networking of the personal computer (the first version of Internet protocols for the PC) also came from MIT's Project MAC (renamed the Laboratory for Computer Science by then), which led to the company called FTP Software. FTP sold the first Internet protocol suite for DOS.

Another lasting spin-off from Project MAC was the popular operating system, Unix. The difficulty that Bell Laboratories had in developing the MULTICS operating system led to a new philosophy of software design stressing simplicity and elegance. In 1969, when Bell Laboratories realized that a commercial product was still many years away, it withdrew from Project MAC. Over the next 5 years, Bell researchers Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, along with others who had been working with MAC and had become frustrated with MULTICS's complexity, developed Unix, which was based on MULTICS but was much simpler. It offered quick responses, had minimal system overhead, and ran on minicomputers instead of more expensive mainframes with special memory management systems.

Beyond the technical advances in time-sharing, Project MAC influenced an industrywide movement toward developing time-sharing computers. When searching for a contractor to supply the hardware for MULTICS, MIT turned down its traditional supplier, IBM, and hired General Electric (GE) because of IBM's unwillingness to modify their machines for the project. The early results of Project MAC, though, convinced IBM and other manufacturers that they would have to pursue time-sharing (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996, p. 215). By 1967, 20 firms were competing for a $20 million industry providing time-shared computer services to businesses across the nation including GE, Telcomp, Tymshare, Keydata, and University Computing

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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Company. By the mid-1970s, almost every mainframe computer sold incorporated time-sharing technology (Reed et al., 1990, pp. 9-14).

Project MAC was largely responsible for bringing the computer out of the laboratory and business and leading it to the home. Licklider's desire to create a "new way of thinking" about computers succeeded. Project MAC developed technology and ideas that allowed interactive computing to become a reality. . . ." As a result of Project MAC and other computer time-sharing research programs in the late 1960s, the concept of computer utilities became widely accepted in the computer and business world. In 1964, only one year after Project MAC began, Martin Greenberger wrote, "Barring unforeseen obstacles, an on-line interactive computer service, provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace by 2000 A.D. as the telephone service is today'' (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996, p. 217). The image Greenberger described is remarkably similar to the Internet. Before time-sharing became a reality, computing remained available only to large businesses, academic institutions, and the government. However, as more users could simultaneously use a single machine, the cost of computing dramatically decreased, and usage increased accordingly. Project MAC played a large role in the public's change of philosophy regarding the use of computers.

1  

This relationship between cost and the power of mainframes was often referred to as Grosch's law.

bureaucrats but were usually academics on a 2-year tour of duty. They saw ARPA as a pulpit from which to preach their visions, with money to help them realize those visions. The entire system displayed something of a self-organizing, self-managing nature. As Ivan Sutherland recalled, "Good research comes from the researchers themselves rather than from the outside."5

National Science Foundation

While ARPA was focusing on large projects and systems, the National Science Foundation played a large role in legitimizing basic computer science research as an academic discipline and in funding individual researchers at a wide range of institutions. Its programs in computing have evolved considerably since its founding in 1950, but have tended to balance support for research, education, and computing infrastructure. Although early programs tended to focus on the use of computing in other academic disciplines, NSF subsequently emerged as the leading federal funder of basic research in computer science.

NSF was formed before computing became a clearly defined research area, and it established divisions for chemistry, physics, and biology, but not computing. NSF did provide support for computing in its early years,

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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but this support derived more from a desire to promote computer-related activities in other disciplines than to expand computer science as a discipline, and as such was weighted toward support for computing infrastructure (NSF, 1956, p. 57). For example, NSF poured millions of dollars into university computing centers so that researchers in other disciplines, such as physics and chemistry, could have access to computing power. NSF noted that little computing power was available to researchers at American universities who were not involved in defense-related research and that "many scientists feel strongly that further progress in their field will be seriously affected by lack of access to the techniques and facilities of electronic computation" (NSF, 1958, p. 103). As a result, NSF began supporting computing centers at universities in 1956 and, in 1959, allocated a budget specifically for computer equipment purchases. Recognizing that computing technology was expensive, became obsolete rapidly, and entailed significant costs for ongoing support, NSF decided that it would, in effect, pay for American campuses to enter the computer age. In 1962, it established its first office devoted to computing, the program for Computers and Computing Science within the Mathematical Sciences Division (Aspray and Williams, 1994). By 1970, the Institutional Computing Services (or Facilities) program had obligated $66 million to university computing centers across the country.6 NSF intended that use of the new facilities would result in trained personnel to fulfill increasing needs for computer proficiency in industry, government, and academia.

NSF provided some funding for computer-related research in its early years. Originally, such funding came out of the mathematics division in the 1950s and grew out of an interest in numerical analysis. By 1955, NSF began to fund basic research in computer science theory with its first grants for the research of recursion theory and one grant to develop an analytical computer program under the Mathematical Sciences Program. Although these projects constituted less than 10 percent of the mathematics budget, they resulted in significant research.

In 1967, NSF united all the facets of its computing support into a single office, the Office of Computing Activities (OCA). The new office incorporated elements from the directorates of mathematics and engineering and from the Facilities program, unifying NSF's research and infrastructure efforts in computing. It also incorporated an educational element that was intended to help meet the radically increasing demand for instruction in computer science (Aspray and Williams, 1994). The OCA was headed by Milton Rose, the former head of the Mathematical Sciences Section, and reported directly to the director of NSF.

Originally, the OCA's main focus was improving university computing services. In 1967, $11.3 million of the office's $12.8 million total budget went toward institutional support (NSF, 1967, pp. 53-54). Because not all

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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universities were large enough to support their own computing centers but would benefit from access to computing time at other universities, the OCA also began to support regional networks linking many universities together. In 1968, the OCA spent $5.3 million, or 18.6 percent of its budget, to provide links between computers in the same geographic region (NSF, 1968). In the 1970s, the computer center projects were canceled, however, in favor of shifting emphasis toward education and research.

Beginning in 1968, through the Education and Training program, the OCA began funding the inauguration of university-level computer science programs. NSF funded several conferences and studies to develop computer science curricula. The Education and Training program obligated $12.3 million between 1968 and 1970 for training, curricula development, and support of computer-assisted instruction.7

Although the majority of the OCA's funding was spent on infrastructure and education, the office also supported a broad range of basic computer science research programs. These included compiler and language development, theoretical computer science, computation theory, numerical analysis, and algorithms. The Computer Systems Design program concentrated on computer architecture and systems analysis. Other programs focused on topics in artificial intelligence, including pattern recognition and automatic theory proving.

1970-1990: Retrenching and International Competition

Despite previous successes, the 1970s opened with computing at a critical but fragile point. Although produced by a large and established industry, commercial computers remained the expensive, relatively esoteric tools of large corporations, research institutions, and government. Computing had not yet made its way to the common user, much less the man in the street. This movement would begin in the mid-1970s with the introduction of the microprocessor and then unfold in the 1980s with even greater drama and force. If the era before 1960 was one of experimentation and the 1960s one of consolidation and diffusion in computing, the two decades between 1970 and 1990 were characterized by explosive growth. Still, this course of events was far from clear in the early 1970s.

Computer Science, Computer Technology

By 1970, computer science was just emerging as a discipline. Many of the major computer science departments were established (at places like Stanford University, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon University), but computer science did not yet have the academic legitimacy of the older fields

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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of physics, chemistry, and biology. Was computer science really a science? Although much theoretical work examined fundamental questions of computability that are independent of computing hardware, many problems for computing research stemmed from experience with the construction and use of actual computers (man-made instruments as opposed to naturally occurring phenomena).8 During the 1970s, computer scientists would continue to answer these questions with a growing and mature body of theoretical work.

Technologically, the 1970s, like the 1950s, might be characterized as a decade of experiments. The Unix operating system grew to prominence during this decade, at first in research environments and then increasingly in industry. Although the minicomputer industry competed successfully with mainframes, it faced a threat of its own: Intel delivered the first microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971, soon followed by the 8-bit 8008, the basis of the first personal computers. Networking became an increasing focus of research and systems: the ARPANET, although formulated in the 1960s, became an operational system in the 1970s: it had 4 nodes in 1970, 23 in the next year, and was publicly demonstrated in Washington in 1972. In 1973, Xerox unveiled its Alto personal computer, a system of boxes, each of which was controlled with a graphical user interface and a mouse, with each box connected to others throughout the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) through an Ethernet network. Still, it would take almost another 20 years before this visionary technology's prototype became the tangible reality of the world of business computing in the United States.

Also during the 1970s, a veritable computer culture emerged—hobbyists who touted computer liberation and experimentation with small microprocessor-based machines, often outside of institutional environments. It took Steve Jobs, Apple Computer, and the computerized spreadsheet, however, to turn the hobbyist personal computer into the ubiquitous piece of business equipment and consumer product it later became. Popular mythology celebrates the independent entrepreneurs who produced the personal computer (PC) revolution—Steve Jobs at Apple, Mitch Kapor at Lotus, and Bill Gates at Microsoft. These innovators built upon ideas developed previously, many of them with government funding (Box 4.3). IBM also played a critical role in making the new technology established and acceptable with its 1981 introduction of the IBM PC. Packaged with Lotus 123 and MS-DOS, the IBM PC gave the business marketplace what it wanted from a personal computer (Malone, 1995).

Until about 1980, truly capable computers remained large boxes. This began to change with the birth of the desktop workstation, based on the microprocessor. After Xerox built its Alto computers, it donated 10 machines to Stanford's Computer Science Department. They inspired Forest

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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BOX 4.3 Roots of the Personal Computer

The development of the personal computer (PC) is illustrative of the symbiosis between government and industry in the evolving computer industry. While the PC stands as a monument to industrial innovation and the foresight and tenacity of individual entrepreneurs, federally sponsored research also played a role. The Macintosh operating system and Microsoft Windows, which trace their lineage to the Alto computer developed by Xerox between 1973 and 1978, incorporate concepts first explored by researchers working with federal support.

In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration provided funding for Douglas Engelbart to create a new research program at the Stanford Research Institute to work on improving human-computer interactions. Engelbart's research concentrated on using computers to augment the abilities of an individual as opposed to automating those abilities. In 1968, at the Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart presented the NLS (On-Line System), a computerized office system that his group developed. The NLS was the first system to use a mouse and the first to use windows. The invention of the mouse and its use as part of a graphical user interface represented a dramatic change from the standard command-line operation of computers. Most mainframe and time-sharing systems at the time relied on typed commands that computer novices found cryptic and difficult to use. Text on the screen could often be edited only by referencing the line number as opposed to changing the text in place. The use of a mouse and graphical user interface began the trend to make computers usable by anyone.

Designers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) later incorporated Engelbart's advances into a graphical user interface for Xerox's Alto computer. The Alto was designed for users including "children from age 5 or 6 and 'noncomputer adults' such as secretaries, librarians, architects, musicians, housewives, doctors and so on" (ACM, 1993, p. 29). The Alto also drew upon the ideas described in Alan Kay's doctoral thesis, work that was also supported by ARPA while Kay was at the University of Utah. Kay described a computer called FLEX that would act as "an interactive tool which can aid in the visualization and realization of provocative notions. It must be simple enough so that one does not have to become a systems programmer (one who understands the arcane rites) to use it. It must be cheap enough to be owned (like a grand piano). It must do more than just be able to realize computable functions; it has to be able to form the abstractions in which the user deals. FLEX is an idea debugger and as such, it is hoped that it is also an idea media."1 Kay envisioned this computer of the future to be the size of a notebook, one that could handle all of an individual's personal information management and manipulation needs. Kay later called this computer the Dynabook. Kay was not able to build an operational Dynabook for his thesis, but the new computing context was influential. "Since at first people shared computers, the idea that everyone should have their own was a breakthrough" (ACM, 1993, p. 31).

Robert Taylor, the associate manager of the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) at PARC recruited Alan Kay for the Xerox System Science Laboratory (SSL) in an attempt to integrate the SSL and CSL in working toward a shared goal. Taylor was a former director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office and used his

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

knowledge of the field and the key researchers in it to staff the laboratory and provide direction. He followed the same principles he used at ARPA: enlisting the most talented researchers and giving them the freedom to follow their own imagination.2 Taylor planned for the CSL to create the hardware infrastructure for distributed personal computing and for SSL to design software and applications for it (Smith and Alexander, 1988, pp. 70-71). While working in the SSL, Kay developed the SmallTalk language on which most of Alto's software was developed. SmallTalk was the first object-oriented programming language.

Xerox was never able to market the Alto successfully, but its influence is noticeable in most business and home computers in use today. In 1979, Steve Jobs was invited to tour Xerox PARC. Jobs realized the potential for the Alto system. He told the demonstrator of the system, Larry Tesler, ''Why isn't Xerox marketing this? . . . You could blow everything away" (Smith and Alexander, 1988, p. 241). Jobs then incorporated many aspects of the Alto into the Apple Lisa, first produced in 1983, and its successor, the Maclntosh. The popularity of graphical user interfaces grew rapidly. Eventually Microsoft introduced Windows, beginning the conversion of x86 PCs from the command-line operating system DOS to the operating systems prevalent today.

  • 1  

    Alan Kay as quoted in Smith and Alexander (1988).

  • 2  

    Taylor was not alone in his management style at IPTO. Other program managers and office managers at DARPA, including J.C.R. Licklider, used a similar style.

Baskett and student Andy Bechtolsheim to build a successor for engineering and scientific applications. The Stanford University Network (SUN) developed new desktop computers with Ethernet networking and high-resolution, high-speed graphics, tapping into DARPA's Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit (VLSI) program en route. In 1982, Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy acquired venture capital to found Sun Microsystems, Inc.

By 1980, the sales of the computer equipment industry made up a significant share of the value of all domestically produced goods and services (GDP) (Table 4.1). The share of GDP contributed by the computing and office equipment industry continued to grow over the next decade, and investments in computing, communications, and office equipment began to absorb more than half of all gross fixed business investment in plant and equipment. The industry routinely built for commercial users complex systems combining computing and communications—technology once reserved for the military. Software became increasingly prominent, as a mass-market industry selling shrink-wrapped products, and as a subject of intellectual and managerial inquiry as the "software

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

TABLE 4.1 Computing and Related Equipment as a Share of the National Economy

Year

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (in billions of dollars)

Sales of Computing and Related Equipment (in billions of dollars)

Computer Equipment as a Percentage of GDP

1960

513

1.5

0.3

1970

1,010

10.5

1.0

1980

2,708

55.1

2.0

1990

5,546

154.8

2.8

1995

7,117

204.8

2.9

 

SOURCES: National Science Board (1996); ITI (1997).

crisis" increasingly demonstrated the difficulty of bringing in large programming projects on time and within budget. As the computer industry exploded, traditional industrial research and development increased proportionally. But only the largest companies could afford broad-based research efforts to rival those of universities and government laboratories. In 1984, for example, IBM still conducted 50 percent of the R&D (by dollar value) in the computer industry as a whole (Flamm, 1987).

The Changing Political Context

While the 1970s and 1980s saw explosions in the growth of technology, they also witnessed a changing environment for government-supported research. During the 1970s, the war in Vietnam became the driving force, tending to redirect research toward military purposes and raising concerns about the effect of defense funding on university research. During the 1980s, traditional defense concerns gave way to industrial competitiveness as the primary driver of research policy. Both these changes had a significant effect on the nature, structure, and direction of federally sponsored research in computing.

Science and Politics in the 1970s: A Changed Climate

Tension over the Vietnam War brought campus protests against the war and against defense-related research on campus, forcing some universities to change their policies. As the costs of the war escalated, research budgets were increasingly squeezed within the Pentagon. In the 1970s, despite the fabulous success of the Apollo program in putting a man on the moon in 1969, a general skepticism about the role of science in

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

society—and hence the role of scientific research—began to emerge. Divisions over Vietnam, heightened distrust of authority in the wake of Watergate, the oil crisis of 1973, and increased awareness of pollution and environmental damage all contributed to the changed role of science in the public sphere. DOD funding for mathematics and computer science reached a two-decade low in 1975. Government support for science and technology, although not necessarily in crisis, would never again enjoy the same prominence it had in the previous decade; the golden age of research support was over.

Politics intervened in other ways during this time, too. The Nixon administration, for example, did not think NSF should be in the business of developing computer networks, seeing such activities as the province of private business. As a result, NSF's activities were severely curtailed in this area. The Nixon administration also pushed for more directed research programs in computer science that addressed specific national problems, such as education and environment, rather than letting the research community have most of the role in defining research directions. These sentiments were matched by similarly motivated actions in Congress.

In 1969, Congress forbade military funding for any research that did not have a "direct or apparent relationship to a specific military function or operations." This legislation, enacted into law as the Mansfield Amendment (named after its sponsor) to the Defense Authorization Act of 1970 (Public Law 91-121), was short lived, but it sent a strong signal to the research community: it would have to demonstrate the military relevance of its work. Some program managers thought this would involve merely rewriting project descriptions with an emphasis on applications, and no doubt frequently they were correct. But the Mansfield Amendment, and the mood that gave rise to it, had the longer-term impact of shortening the time horizons for government research support in general and defense research in particular. Both ARPA and NSF materially felt the effects of this new climate in their computing programs.

Policy for the 1980s: Industrial Research and Competitiveness

In the 1980s, fears were raised that the microelectronics and computer industries seemed to be going the way of the auto industry—to Japan. Just as in the automobile industry, in which the Japanese had mastered manufacturing technology before turning their attention to design, the Japanese integrated-circuit companies first captured a dominant percentage of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) industry. They began with the process-intensive memory chips and then turned their attention to more-design-intensive processors. As a result, many believed U.S.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

industry to be in trouble in the early 1980s. Compounding the alarm was the declining market share of the semiconductor equipment industry, which makes the intricate manufacturing equipment for chips: its share of the world market fell from 75 percent to 40 percent during the 1980s (Alic et al., 1992). "Competitiveness" became the keyword for U.S. technology policy in the 1980s.

Much of the vast literature analyzing the competitiveness problem focused on the role of government and government-sponsored research. Japan's Ministry of Trade and International Development played a key role in bringing Japanese companies together to cooperate in targeting new markets and technologies. In the United States—amid calls for government action—joint ventures, cooperative agreements, university-industry collaborations, and industry consortia began to emerge to fight the Japanese threat. The National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 exempted research consortia from some antitrust laws and facilitated these mergers. The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, formed in January 1983, was entirely privately funded (at $60 million to $70 million in 1985) by its 12 member companies. Of these new initiatives, SEMATECH, the semiconductor manufacturing technology consortium, was most significant as a government-supported venture.

Changes in the Organization of Federal Research Support

Responses to the changing policy environment echoed throughout the federal research establishment. Significant changes in organization and management occurred at DARPA, NSF, and other federal agencies. New federal initiatives, such as SEMATECH and high-performance computing, began to dominate the research and policy agenda. These changes also reflected advances in computing technology and the evolution of the computing industry. New structures and missions allowed federal agencies to interact better with a growing industry that had an expanding range of capabilities and needs.

Changes at ARPA

ARPA's name was officially changed to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1972, presaging changes in IPTO and its personnel as well. George Heilmeier, director of DARPA from 1975 to 1977, came, unlike his predecessors, from an industrial background. Heilmeier brought an emphasis on applications to DARPA and a more formalized management style to the agency. As one program manager recalled, "During the 1970s . . . there was tremendous pressure to produce stuff that looked like it had a short applications horizon."9 The

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

shortening time horizon had tangible effects, especially in IPTO. J.C.R. Licklider, who had started the office in the early 1960s, with a free hand and in his own image, returned for a stint as program director in 1974-1975 and found it a changed place (Norberg and O'Neill, 1996, pp. 37-38). After that, the agency had difficulty finding a successor to serve as director of IPTO.

These changes at DARPA, and in particular at IPTO, represented the natural evolution of an organization as it matures. IPTO's funding more than doubled from the $9 million of 1962 to $23 million in 1970, and it accounted for most of DOD's basic research and about half of the applied research in computing (Norberg and O'Neill, 1996, p. 55). In that sense Licklider and his cohort had been victims of their own success: IPTO leadership no longer had to evangelize and legitimate the field; they merely administered the research of an established area—an equally important, if perhaps less entrepreneurial, endeavor. Furthermore, Mansfield-era changes did bring some benefits. At first IPTO's computer research had all been classified as 6.1, DOD parlance for basic research. Now the emphasis shifted to 6.2, or "Exploratory Development," which expanded. Even in the early 1970s, 6.2 constituted more than half of the IPTO budget and after 1971 was responsible for most of its growth. As mentioned above, the shift also had the effect of transferring much of the basic research from DARPA to NSF.

Arguably, this change in the priority of applications and development, although potentially threatening to Licklider's original vision (and sometimes odious to academic investigators), built upon a decade of basic research. IPTO-sponsored research had created numerous new ideas that could now be tried on a large scale. Indeed, IPTO had several large, applications-oriented programs already under way in the early 1970s, including the ILLIAC IV and the ARPANET (see Chapter 7). The first was a modular parallel supercomputer being built at the University of Illinois. The second project, ARPANET, was built to demonstrate principles of computer networking that had been worked out in the previous decade. Both of these projects emphasized hardware, and both were built under large contracts let to industrial contractors (ILLIAC by Burroughs and ARPANET by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman). Together, ILLIAC IV and ARPANET consumed a significant portion of IPTO's budget in 1972. Nevertheless, the changes in DARPA's focus generated considerable controversy that continues to this day.

One man epitomized the new approach at DARPA. Robert Kahn joined the agency after a stint on the MIT faculty and at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, where he worked on the construction of the original ARPANET. He joined DARPA as a program manager in 1972 and eventually took over as director of IPTO in 1979. Kahn embraced the new DARPA envi-

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

ronment and turned it to IPTO's benefit. As a program manager and a technical leader, Kahn collaborated with contractors, defining systems for packet radio, networking, and eventually the internetworking protocols that became the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). On the latter effort, Kahn worked closely with Vinton Cerf, who was first at the University of California, Los Angeles, then at Stanford, and then assumed Kahn's networking responsibilities as a program manager at DARPA.

When Kahn became director at IPTO, his main direction from Heilmeier was to apply a ''forcing function" to artificial intelligence (AI) "to produce something that would be useful" (Kahn, 1989). In addition to pushing AI, Kahn had two major goals of his own: (1) restoring, and then increasing, budgets for basic research (6.1), which had declined during the 1970s; and (2) increasing the involvement of industry in DARPA programs, creating overt links between universities and companies to transfer technology. "Transfer was all happening . . . by the invisible hand of the marketplace, or venture capital, or something. . . . But DARPA was not taking any role," Kahn recalled.

To accomplish his first goal, Kahn separated IPTO's applications programs from basic research so they could be managed in different styles. The Engineering Applications Office (EAO) split off for applications and "technology base" efforts. The move met with questionable success, and, when Saul Amarel succeeded Kahn as head of IPTO, he thought that EAO and IPTO were unnecessarily competing for resources. The two offices were recombined into the Information Systems Technology Office (ISTO). Kahn developed two major strategies to achieve his goals: the Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits program and the Strategic Computing Initiative.

Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits.10

Efforts to develop very large scale integrated circuit (VLSI) technology demonstrate the role DARPA played in the growing computing industry by identifying technological developments of interest to DOD and the industry as a whole and helping them reach a state of greater maturity. Pioneering work in VLSI was conducted in the mid-1970s by Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) with interests in semiconductor technology, and Lynn Conway, an expert in computer architecture at Xerox PARC. Encouraged by Bert Sutherland, Conway's laboratory manager at Xerox, and Bert's brother, Ivan Sutherland, chair of computer science at CalTech, Mead and Conway developed a simplified, standardized system design methodology and layout design rules for VLSI system and circuit design. Their design methods allowed integrated circuit (IC) designers to more quickly and easily design new ICs. Conway also innovated a new form of network-based, fast-turnaround VLSI prototyping service at PARC.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

Called the MPC Implementation System, the service enabled chips designers at many locations around the country to submit design files over the ARPANET for low-cost, rapid fabrication. The MPC system became the basis of what was later called the Metal Oxide Silicon Implementation Service, or MOSIS.

Mead and Conway propagated their new design methods and rules through courses they taught during 1978 and 1979, first Conway's course at MIT and then additional courses at other universities such as Stanford, University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley), and CalTech, exploiting prepublication versions of their new textbook about the methods. In the fall of 1979, Conway and her group at Xerox PARC used the MPC system to provide rapid chip prototyping for student design projects at many universities. The success of the many MPC79 designs validated their methods and quickly led to more widespread use of their design methodology. Their book Introduction to VLSI Systems was published by Addison-Wesley in 1980 (Mead and Conway, 1980).

The Mead-Conway approach also spurred development of a rich variety of computer designs as well as related supporting technologies for checking and testing designs, for graphics editors, and for simulators. The design methods and rules formed the basis of the specification language used in the MOSIS program and provided the essential ingredient for developing computer-aided design tools for VLSI layouts. The first such tool, ICARUS, resulted in 1976 from the work of Douglas Fairbairn at Xerox PARC and James Rowson at CalTech. This tool was used in VLSI design courses at Stanford and adopted by a number of researchers. James Clark, then an associate professor at Stanford University, used VLSI tools and techniques to develop a geometry engine for producing complex computer graphic images. In 1982, Clark founded Silicon Graphics, Inc., which commercialized the technology and subsequently became a leader in visual computing systems.11

DARPA's VLSI program built upon these early efforts. Formally initiated by Robert Kahn in 1978, the DARPA program grew out of a study it commissioned at RAND Corporation in 1976 to evaluate the scope of research DARPA might support in VLSI (Sutherland et al., 1976). The final report, written by Ivan Sutherland, Carver Mead, and Thomas Everhardt, concluded that continued attempts to increase computational power by packing more devices onto a single integrated circuit—as industry was attempting—ignored the possibility of even greater gains through wholly new computer architectures. As the report noted, the advancement of VLSI technologies required new paradigms for integrated circuit designs, because the circuit elements themselves would become cheap, but the interconnections between them would become more expensive.12 Sutherland and Mead published a derivative article in Scien-

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

tific American in September 1977 to gain an even broader audience for their ideas (Sutherland and Mead, 1977).

DARPA's plan for its VLSI program was to foster revolutionary advances by supporting university research and building bridges between research communities. To promote information sharing, DARPA maintained open, nonrestrictive policies on the publication of results, supported research with only indirect connections to military or defense applications, and refrained from classifying results.13 These principles stood in direct contrast to DOD's other main semiconductor initiative of the time, the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) program, which tried to advance industrial practices in a more incremental fashion, required direct defense relevance, and had a number of restrictions in place on publication of results.

DARPA played a strong role in identifying VLSI as an area for strategic direction but allowed much of the program content to emerge from the research community. Proposals were supported on the basis of their individual persuasiveness and the track record of the proposing institutions and principal investigators. Between 1978 and 1979, DARPA funded about a dozen programs in various aspects of VLSI technology at centers such as CalTech, Carnegie Mellon University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MIT, Mississippi State University, University of North Carolina, Stanford University, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Utah. DARPA favored proposals drawn broadly to cover a range of related areas under the supervision of a single principal investigator. Many, if not most, of the participants were early adopters of the Mead-Conway design methods and thus had a common basis on which to build their research explorations.

Management of DARPA's VLSI program was turned over to Duane Adams in 1980 and to Paul Losleben in 1981 after Adams was promoted to deputy director of IPTO. Losleben came from the National Security Agency and brought expertise in semiconductor processing technology. Under their direction, the VLSI program evolved into four major lines of research: (1) computer architecture and system design; (2) microelectronic device fabrication process; (3) education and human resource development in microelectronics and computer science; and (4) fast-turnaround design fabrication, testing, and evaluation. The program made numerous contributions in each of these areas (Box 4.4 describes some prominent examples) and contributed to the commercialization of several VLSI-based technologies (Table 4.2). Part of this success resulted from the close ties between research and educational initiatives, with experimental classes leading to technologies such as reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors, and research feeding back into the education and training of students.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

TABLE 4.2 Representative VLSI Technologies and Resulting Commercial Products

Technology

Investigator/Institution

Product/Company

RISC Architectures

 

 

RISC I and RISC II

David Patterson,

UC-Berkeley

SPARC,

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

MIPS

John Hennessy,

Stanford University

MIPS Computers, Inc.

(now part of Silicon Graphics, Inc.)

Parallel Processors

 

 

Connection Machine

Danny Hillis,

MIT

Thinking Machines, Inc.

Cosmic Cube

Charles Seitz,

CalTech

iPSC (Intel)

WARP

H.T. Kung,

Carnegie Mellon University

iWARP (Intel)

Computer Systems

 

 

Geometry Engine

Jim Clark,

Stanford University

Silicon Graphics, Inc.

SUN (networked)

Forest Baskett,

Stanford University

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Design Tools

 

 

Caesar

John Ousterhout,

UC-Berkeley

Public domain

Magic

John Ousterhout,

UC-Berkeley

Multiplea

a Valid Logic, Viewlogic, Mentor Graphics, Daisy, and Cadence all have products essentially based on the Magic concept.

SOURCE: Van Atta et al. (1991a), Table 17-2, pp. 17-17 through 17-19.

On the technical side, the focus of the VLSI program expanded from attempts to accelerate development of submicron semiconductor devices to a broader set of improvements in computer capabilities based on submicron devices, with particular attention to computer design and architecture. DOD anticipated a range of uses for new-generation computers, including signal processing and interpretation, aerodynamic simulation, artificial intelligence, image and speech recognition, robotics, and high-performance graphics (Van Atta et al., 1991a). Research it supported led to a variety of new architectures that found acceptance both in DOD and in the commercial marketplace (Box 4.4).

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

BOX 4.4 Accomplishments of DARPA's Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit Program

DARPA's Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit (VLSI) program supported research on a number of innovations that revolutionized computing and computing research. Work on computer workstations, reduced instruction set computing, and semiconductor fabrication services for university researchers, in particular, benefited from DARPA support. In each of these areas, DARPA identified ongoing research of interest and provided the support necessary to bring the work to fruition.

Computer Workstations

Although industry efforts to develop computer workstations were under way at companies such as Apollo Computer, they received a significant boost from DARPA-sponsored research. DARPA supported the work of Forest Baskett, a specialist in computer architecture at Stanford University, who submitted a proposal to DARPA to create the Stanford University Network (SUN). As part of this effort, he planned to build a powerful single-user workstation, combining a 32-bit microprocessor (like Motorola's new 68000) and a wide-screen display. Baskett set Andreas Bechtolsheim to work on the hardware. He also interacted with James Clark, whose work on a high-speed graphics engine Baskett saw as critical to scientific and engineering applications of the system. The prototype SUN workstation was successfully demonstrated in 1981.

DARPA and Stanford University encouraged Bechtolsheim to commercialize the workstation, which he originally did through a company called VLSI Systems, which was to produce the workstation boards for other computer manufacturers. After reviewing proposals from potential computer manufacturers and seeing Apollo announce its own workstation, however, Bechtolsheim realized he would have to move quickly and design his own machines. Key to his plan was using Unix, recently expanded by Bill Joy at UC-Berkeley under another DARPA VLSI contract to enhance its multitasking, multiuser, and networking capabilities. With help from Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy (both Stanford University MBAs), Bechtolsheim was able to solicit Joy's participation and attract needed venture capital. The team established Sun Microsystems, Inc., in February 1982, and its first product was launched in 1983.1 DARPA extended funds to a number of academic institutions to allow them to purchase workstations for institutional users and networks. Such purchases accounted for 80 percent of Sun Microsystems' sales in its first year of business.2 Since then, Sun has become a major force in the computing industry as both a manufacturer of computer workstations and the developer of the Java programming language.

RISC

Reduced instruction set computing (RISC) computers promised significant gains in performance by optimizing the flow of instructions through the processing unit.3 Although pioneering work on RISC architectures was conducted by IBM as part of its 801 computer, IBM did not move quickly to commercialize the technology for fear that it would detract from burgeoning sales of its mainframe computers; nor was such

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

work well publicized, although its existence became known in academic research circles (Hennessy and Patterson, 1990).4 DARPA sponsored two university-based programs to develop RISC as a workable technology under VLSI: one, led by David Patterson at UC-Berkeley, developed the RISC I and RISC II architectures; the other, led by John Hennessy at Stanford University, resulted in the MIPS architecture. Both were general-purpose designs aimed at achieving more efficient interaction between computational, storage, and communications units within a device structure by employing pipelined architectures and processors closely linked with memory and communication circuits.

Both designs were adopted rapidly by industry. The newly formed Sun Microsystems, Inc., licensed the RISC II architecture from the University of California and hired Patterson as a consultant to help develop the scalable processor architecture, a RISC-based design that it subsequently incorporated into its workstations. This technology enabled Sun to fend off growing competition from companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, and Steve Jobs' NeXT Corporation, which were planning their own entries into the workstation market. Hennessy and his colleagues at Stanford University founded MIPS Computer Systems to commercialize their RISC architecture. The company licensed five major chip producers to produce devices based on the technology and five other companies to use the MIPS architecture in their own computers. MIPS Computer Systems was subsequently purchased by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), although SGI is currently spinning off the company.

Other Architecture Projects

The VLSI program supported research on a number of innovative computer architectures other than RISC. Most of this work centered on designs for parallel computers. A range of projects supported a variety of configurations for linking microprocessors and memory, from the connection machine to the cube machines for general-purpose computing and the WARP architectures for special-purpose applications, such as signal processing. Several of these approaches were commercialized through start-up companies, such as Thinking Machines Corporation, or established firms, such as Intel Corporation. Although successful technologically, many of these designs failed to achieve commercial success.

MOSIS

DARPA also worked to establish ongoing technical and human infrastructure for VLSI. Of note was establishment of the Metal Oxide Silicon Implementation Service (MOSIS). Based on the innovative MultiProject Chip (MPC) service created by Lynn Conway at Xerox PARC (Conway, 1981), MOSIS provided university researchers with a means of quickly manufacturing limited numbers of custom or semicustom microelectronic devices at reasonable cost. New designs could be implemented in silicon within 4 to 10 weeks (less than the duration of an academic term). Prior to MOSIS (and the original MPC service), academic researchers had few economical ways of implementing and testing new semiconductor designs, few universities could afford their own fabrication lines, and the proliferation of different commercial systems of rules for specifying semiconductor circuit designs—most of which were kept proprietary—made collaboration between universities and industry difficult. With

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

MOSIS, researchers could submit designs for fabrication in a standardized format through the ARPANET or, subsequently, e-mail. Requests from different researchers were pooled into common lots and run through the fabrication process, after which completed chips were returned to the researchers. This system obviated the need for direct access to a fabrication line or for dealing with the complexity of arranging fabrication time at an industrial facility, by providing access to a qualified group of fabrication facilities through a single interface.

MOSIS was widely used by the academic research community and contributed to many novel systems. Access to MOSIS was originally limited to the VLSI research community and other Department of Defense contractors who linked to it through the ARPANET. After the National Science Foundation (NSF) assumed responsibility for administering MOSIS in 1982, access was expanded to include NSF-sponsored researchers and affiliated educational institutions. In 1984, access was expanded to other qualified users as well. Altogether, MOSIS was used by researchers at more than 360 institutions by 1989. The number of projects run through MOSIS increased from 258 in 1981 to 1,880 in 1989. RISC-based designs, such as RISC I, RISC II, and MIPS, and the geometry engine later commercialized by SGI were all run through MOSIS during their early design and testing phases. Prominent VLSI researcher Charles Seitz commented that MOSIS represented the first period since the pioneering work of Eckert and Mauchley on the ENIAC in the late 1940s that universities and small companies had access to state-of-the-art digital technology.5

Design Tools

DARPA also supported development of tools for designing VLSI devices. In 1978 and 1979, DARPA funded development of a program for step-level improvement in the layout of microelectronic devices. The result was Caesar, an interactive VLSI layout editor that was written in C, enabling it to run on VAX computers using the Berkeley version of Unix developed by Bill Joy. Caesar produced CalTech intermediate form files for use with the MOSIS system and was used to develop the RISC I, RISC II, and MIPS designs. Further modification made the tool suitable for more widespread use. A later, more advanced design technology created at UC-Berkeley, Magic, became even more widely used and formed the basis for several computer-assisted design systems, including those by VLSI Technology, Cadence, Valid Logic, Daisy, Mentor Graphics, and Viewlogic.

  • 1  

    S. Squires, chief scientist, DARPA, ISTO, October 19, 1990, as cited in Van Atta et al. (1991a).

  • 2  

    Vinod Khosla, as cited in Van Atta et al. (1991a).

  • 3  

    Ideally, all RISC processor instructions (for example, adding two registers) execute in one clock cycle. In actual practice, some instructions (such as multiplication and division) require additional clock cycles. Depending on the implementation, other instructions (such as shifts and register loads from memory) may require more than one clock cycle—this makes the distinction between RISC and complex instruction set computers (CISCs) somewhat gray. Mitchell Schnier, Dictionary of PC Hardware

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

DARPA was by far the largest federal supporter of VLSI research. Its funding for the VLSI program grew from less than $15 million in 1979 to over $93 million in 1982. But other organizations also played critical roles in the success of the VLSI program. NSF assumed responsibility for MOSIS. Its main objective was to pursue educational applications of MOSIS, and it expanded the reach of the program to a wider set of academic institutions than DARPA had. ONR, too, funded several projects in VLSI but with much smaller grants than DARPA. ONR funds were often considered a ''sandbox" for new ideas that, if successful, would merit subsequent DARPA funding.14 Similarly, industry contributed to university research. The Stanford Center for Integrated Systems, for example, attracted funding in small amounts from 11 to 12 companies. This money was generally used to support students and to fund faculty who were starting new research areas and who lacked the long track record needed to attract DARPA funding. Hence, while government research funding dwarfed industry contributions, industry funding was key for launching areas not mature enough to merit government support.15

Federal funding for VLSI began to decline in the mid-1980s. By 1983, plans for DARPA's Strategic Computing Initiative evolved to the point that the most promising ongoing architecture projects in the VLSI program (such as WARP, Butterfly, and Connection Machine) shifted to the new program. The VLSI program became increasingly focused on semiconductor devices. Main elements of the program included computer-aided design and manufacturing technology, test and evaluation tools, and implementation and testing technologies, including ongoing support for MOSIS.

Strategic Computing Initiative.

Kahn's second strategy was the Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI), which he formulated and proposed with

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

the support of Heilmeier's successor, DARPA director Robert Cooper. First presented to Congress in 1983, SCI aimed to spend $600 million by combining many of DARPA's computer research projects into an overall effort, with heavy emphasis on artificial intelligence. SCI responded to the growing unease about the apparent loss of U.S. leadership in the semiconductor and computer industries to Japan, following in the footsteps of the auto industry. Japan's "Fifth-Generation" computer program, run by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, seemed a direct threat. Kahn and DARPA management argued that a strong, domestic electronics and computer industry was critical to national security. The argument succeeded: the project was budgeted originally at $145 million in 1986.

Kahn proposed four areas for SCI: microelectronics (based on the VLSI program), supercomputers, generic applications, and defense applications. The main goals were to create an industrial base for artificial intelligence, to implement multiprocessor technologies that could improve the speed of artificial intelligence programs by three orders of magnitude, and to develop advanced speech-understanding capabilities. Unlike the earlier, university-oriented IPTO, Kahn's vision incorporated industrial projects, with careful timelines and scheduled breakthroughs. In line with the shift to applications, industry would contribute to the production of three major "testbeds," or demonstration projects: the Autonomous Land Vehicle, to navigate hostile terrain based on visual sensors; the Pilot's Associate to respond to a fighter-pilot's verbal commands; and the Battle Management program, a series of expert systems to aid commanders in naval warfare. "The SCI proposed, for the first time, to place expert systems and other AI technology into central roles in military equipment and command" (Edwards, 1996, p. 295). Unlike the earlier university-based research programs, nearly half of SCI's funds went directly to industry, with corresponding emphasis on tangible results and applications. In the words of Kenneth Flamm, "economic and industrial spinoffs were a conscious objective of the program's planners'' (Flamm, 1987, p. 75). In the words of Saul Amarel, who succeeded Kahn as IPTO program director, "the whole thing was motivated by developing an AI technology that would be richer, and more mature, building on what was done over the last twenty, twenty-five years, that would have an impact on applications, in particular, military applications . . . that would be used to help develop an industry of AI in the same way that an aeronautical industry was developed in this country'' (Amarel, 1989).

The new approach at DARPA was a radical departure from the vision of its original founders, and it did not go without criticism. Some computer scientists were disturbed by what they saw as a shift away from intellectual research toward demonstrable results. Others were uncom-

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

fortable with the possibility that research products might actually someday pull the trigger in the envisioned autonomous robot weapons. Some AI researchers saw expert systems as anathema to the fundamental goal of building intelligent machines, and some went so far as to regard the 1980s as "years of distraction" because the emphasis on demonstrations locked them into overly concrete promises for intelligent machines (Norberg and O'Neill, 1996). Despite these concerns, the SCI coincided with the early Reagan defense buildup and, hence, formed the centerpiece of DARPA computer research during that decade.

Making a Science, Funding a Science: The NSF in the 1970s and 1980s

The 1970s and 1980s saw a number of changes in NSF's support for computing and communications, resulting in a vastly improved budget for such activities. In 1970, the NSF's OCA lost its favored position below the director and was placed under the Directorate for National and International Programs, marking the beginning of a decline for computing within the NSF hierarchy. Soon, two other large changes to the OCA followed as educational programs (approximately 40 percent of its budget) were spun off to another division. With the passage of the Mansfield Amendment, OCA actually increased its basic research budget from $4.1 million in 1971 (23 percent of its budget) to $9 million dollars in 1973 (90 percent of its budget) (NSF, 1971, pp. 96-101; 1973, p. vii), but only as incomplete compensation for cuts in basic research within DOD. This increase in basic research support did not fully offset the loss of the educational programs, however, leaving the OCA with a budget of only $10 million in 1973, half the size of the 1972 figure. Computing funding did not reach the $20 million mark again until 1981. This distillation of OCA's objectives did, however, leave it as the only entity in the federal government whose primary function was to fund basic research in computer science.

Subsequent changes recognized NSF's leading role in computer science, and, between 1973 and 1985, NSF's computing budgets quadrupled.16 Changes included the creation of the Computer Sciences Section of the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences in 1975 and a new Software Engineering Program created in 1977, which emphasized symbolic manipulation, software tools, and programming environments. Other divisions also conducted computer-related research (Box 4.5). By 1977, the Computer Sciences Section was the largest federal funder of basic research in computer science. In its 1979 budget request to Congress, NSF stated that it "provides approximately 80 percent of the support [for theoretical computer science] except in numerical analysis . . . 50 percent of the federal support [for Software Systems Science] . . . almost

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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BOX 4.5 Computer Engineering at the National Science Foundation

Not all of the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) support for computing-related research came through the computer directorate. In 1973, the NSF created the Electrical Sciences and Analysis Section in its Engineering Division to fund electrical engineering research. Over the course of the next 10 years, the section's budget grew from $7.4 million dollars to $23.7 million in 1984 as NSF incorporated new programs. In 1979, the section was renamed the Division of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering when it began to support computer engineering. The division supported research in very large scale integrated circuit technology, fiber-optic communications networks, and computer-aided drafting.

In 1986, many of the division's programs, including the Computer Engineering program, the Instrumentation, Sensing, and Measurement program, and the Automation, Instrumentation, and Sensing program, were shifted into the new microelectronics information processing system of the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate. The communications programs were left behind, as most of their work focused on voice and video communication, rather than data networks.1

1  

Personal communication from Gordon Bell, former director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation, July 1998.

all of the support for basic research [in Software Engineering] . . . 60 percent of the support for basic research [in Computer Systems Design]" (NSF, 1979, p. B-II-3). NSF was also beginning to increase its support of intelligent systems as DARPA's support for basic AI declined.

Computer research support at NSF took on its current form in 1986. That year, NSF director Erich Bloch announced the creation of a new directorate entirely for computing, the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate (CSTB, 1992, p. 223). To lead the new directorate, Bloch recruited Gordon Bell, a pioneering system architect at Digital Equipment Corporation, who had been pushing NSF for several years to increase funding for computer science. Bell, like others in the computer industry, was still concerned that universities were not training enough Ph.D.s in computer science to continue advancing the field. He believed that the creation of CISE could help alleviate this problem.17

Unlike the more recent organizational changes in computing at NSF, CISE was more than a change of name and bureaucratic position. Much like the creation of OCA, CISE consolidated all the computer initiatives in NSF into one entity. The Division of Computer Research was combined

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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with the computing portions of the Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Division. CISE also absorbed the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing and the Division of Information Science and Technology. Monetary support for computing exploded immediately. CISE's 1986 budget was over $100 million, almost three times the Division of Computer Science's budget in 1984. CISE constituted 7 percent of the entire NSF budget as opposed to 3 percent in 1985.18 In addition, attaining the level of NSF directorate symbolically marked the end of the uncertain position of computing within NSF. Computer science was formally on a par with the biological sciences, the physical sciences, and the other directorates of NSF.

Between 1987 and 1996, the CISE budget more than doubled from $117 million to $259 million, growing at about the same rate as NSF over-all and remaining relatively constant at 7 to 8 percent of NSF's total budget. While all divisions within CISE grew during this period, the Division of Advanced Scientific Computing and the Division of Networking and Communications Research received the majority of the absolute dollar increases, reflecting the growing importance of NSF's infrastructure programs (Table 4.3). The Advanced Scientific Computing Division's budget increased from $42 million to $87 million between 1987 and 1996, making it by far the largest division within CISE, accounting for 35 percent of CISE's budget during that time. The Networking Division's budget increased from approximately 8 percent to almost 20 percent of the entire CISE budget, largely as a result of the NSFNET program and related networking infrastructure programs, which grew from $6.5 million in 1987 to $41.6 million in 1996 (NSFNET and the Advanced Scientific Computing program are discussed in Chapter 3). As a result, infrastructure programs grew from 42 percent to 50 percent of the CISE budget.19

Starting in 1989, CISE also began supporting a number of science and technology centers (STCs) whose goal was to promote collaborative, interdisciplinary research related to computer science. They include centers for computer graphics and scientific visualization, discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, parallel computing, and research in cognitive science. These centers are supported not only by NSF but also by several other federal agencies, universities, and members of industry. Reviews of the STC program in 1995 and 1996 were highly supportive of the centers (National Academy of Public Administration, 1995; National Research Council, 1996).

Other Federal Agencies in the 1970s and 1980s

DARPA and NSF, of course, did not represent all federal funding of computer research during the 1970s and 1980s, though they clearly played

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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TABLE 4.3 Growth in the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate Budget (millions of dollars), 1987-1996

 

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

Computer and computation research

19

22

25

26

29

34

28

30

32

33

Cross-disciplinary activities

16

16

16

18

19

23

22

23

23

27

Advanced scientific computing

43

46

61

71

74

76

75

82

87

88

Information, robotics, and intelligent systems

17

17

18

19

22

25

26

29

30

31

Networking and communications research

10

11

16

20

29

34

39

50

56

54

Computer and information engineering

6

6

6

6

7

8

8

8

9

9

Microelectronics and information processing systems

6

7

8

10

11

13

13

15

16

17

TOTAL

117

124

152

169

190

210

212

236

254

259

NOTE: Totals may not add because of rounding.

SOURCE: Personal communication from Vernon Ross, NSF Office of Budget, Finance, and Award Management, July 1997.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

a dominant role. Although SCI was formulated prior to and independent of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), it could not but be partially absorbed (especially in the minds of the public) by the latter, despite the efforts of DARPA management to keep the programs distinct (Edwards, 1996, pp. 293-299). Reagan's $35 billion SDI program pumped tens of millions of dollars annually into computing.20 SDI critically relied on command-and-control systems for its effectiveness, and doubts about software testing and reliability proved a major hurdle in implementation. SDI also supported work in parallel architectures, optical computing, and new semiconductor materials.

The VHSIC program, launched in 1980, focused on transferring technology from the commercial semiconductor industry into the largely separate military electronics industry. The long procurement cycle of military electronics meant that it was perpetually behind rapidly changing commercial technology. Under the VHSIC program, DOD, through the Office of the Secretary of Defense, spent more than $900 million over the course of the decade, but few new chips actually made their way into military systems. As one analyst wrote, "R&D could not solve a procurement problem" (Alic et al., 1992, p. 269). The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) spent significant funds on the development of the Ada programming language, intended to be standard for all DOD computer applications. While Ada displaced a number of other programming languages in DOD applications, it did not achieve broad acceptance in the commercial marketplace as had been hoped.21 OSD also made a significant investment in software production and maintenance techniques aimed at improving productivity and reliability ($60 million in 1984) (Flamm, 1987, p. 76).

NASA support for computing has varied considerably over the years. Overall, NASA has been more of a development than a research agency in computing: that is, it has focused on hardware and applications rather than basic research. In hardware, the agency built highly rugged and reliable machines to run its spacecraft but with conservative rather than cutting-edge technology. Although NASA tended to have little effect on computer architecture and design (although some significant impact in packaging), its software work in redundant and fault-tolerant computers, simulation, and program verifications made significant contributions to programming practice. The Saturn V computer pioneered triple redundancy and voter circuits (Tomayko, 1985, pp. 7-18). Some of this technology has been transferred to transaction processing in commercial units. Funding began to decline rapidly after the peak of the space program, in the late 1960s, and was virtually halted by 1972, at which point NASA's only computing program was the ILLIAC IV. It took off again in the early 1980s, focusing on image processing and supercomputers for modeling of

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

aerostructures. The NASTRAN software package for finite element modeling of physical structures has become the most widely accepted such program in industry (Flamm, 1987, p. 85). Also during the 1980s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was a small but increasingly important player in developing computer applications for medicine and biology, particularly in innovative applications of expert systems (see Chapters 9 and 10 for a description of NIH's support for expert systems and virtual reality technology). The National Library of Medicine, along with DARPA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), also supported work on information retrieval that has influenced the development of Internet search engines. Similarly, the Department of Energy invested in high-end and parallel machines, at about $7 million per year (Flamm, 1987, p. 93).

SEMATECH

In 1987, 14 U.S. semiconductor companies joined a not-for-profit venture, SEMATECH, to improve domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The joint nature of the effort, combined with member companies' willingness to put significant funds into SEMATECH and concerns over the nation's growing dependence on foreign suppliers for semiconductor devices, helped convince Congress to support the effort as well: in 1988, it appropriated $100 million annually for 5 years to match the industrial funding. The federal dollars for SEMATECH were funneled through DARPA because semiconductor manufacturing was seen as vital to the defense technology base. In the words of one analyst, "the half-billion-dollar federal commitment marks a major shift in U.S. technology policy: a turn toward explicit support for commercially oriented R&D carried out in the private sector" (Alic et al., 1992, p. 277).

SEMATECH originally planned to develop new production processes in-house for manufacturing next-generation semiconductor devices, but soon after decided to concentrate its efforts on strengthening the supplier base for the semiconductor industry. At the time, Japanese semiconductor manufacturing equipment suppliers were gaining market share at a rate of 3.1 percentage points a year, and U.S. semiconductor manufacturers planned to purchase the majority of their equipment from Japanese suppliers (SEMATECH, 1991).

Over the next several years, SEMATECH made several notable advances. It established partnerships with U.S. equipment suppliers to help them develop next-generation production tools, and it helped semiconductor manufacturers develop consensus regarding their future needs, especially those related to manufacturing equipment. These achievements allowed equipment manufacturers to meet one set of industry specifica-

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

tions rather than a variety of company specifications. SEMATECH also funded research and development efforts at supplier companies helping them improve their equipment and develop systems to make more advanced semiconductor devices. Perhaps most important, SEMATECH helped establish improved communication links between semiconductor manufacturers and their suppliers, allowing freer exchanges of information among users and suppliers of manufacturing equipment.

These efforts and others began to show benefits soon thereafter. Semiconductor equipment manufacturers regained market share against the Japanese, boasting 53 percent of the world market in 1992 versus 38 percent for Japanese suppliers (VLSI Research, 1992). Production yields for U.S. semiconductor manufacturers improved from 60 percent in 1987 to 84 percent in 1992, and U.S. market share in semiconductor devices also improved (GAO, 1992, p. 10). Clearly, other factors played a role, not the least of which was the relative rise of the market for microprocessors—in which U.S. firms developed a strong competitive advantage—versus memory chips. Nevertheless, SEMATECH has been cited as a factor in the resurgence of U.S. semiconductor equipment manufacturers. DARPA program managers also considered the effort successful, noting that many of DARPA's objectives were mentioned in SEMATECH's strategic plan, including efforts to rapidly convert manufacturing technology into practice and to develop technology for more flexible semiconductor production (OTA, 1993, p. 128).

DARPA continued its investment in SEMATECH beyond the original deadline, but, in 1995, SEMATECH announced that it would wean itself from public assistance. In doing so, it recognized that it had achieved most of its original objectives and believed it could remain self-sustaining with industry funds only. Doing so would also allow it greater freedom in establishing its research agenda, insulate it from continued uncertainty over federal funding, and reduce concerns about participating with foreign companies. In 1998, SEMATECH announced the establishment of SEMATECH International, a division of SEMATECH that would allow participation by foreign-owned companies.

High-Performance Computing

The late 1980s saw a new theme emerge in government support of computing research: coordination among federal research agencies. The most visible example of this coordination, which also accounts for a significant percentage of today's federal support for computing R&D, is the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative (HPCCI). Although this program focused on the highest-end computers and applications, it has much broader impact. The pace of microelectronics means

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

that the evolution of a given capability (hardware and software) from supercomputer to desktop requires about a decade. Thus, today's high-performance applications are a glimpse into the future of computing.

In keeping with its traditional role of providing facilities for computer science in universities, in 1984 the NSF asked Congress to set up supercomputer centers so academic researchers could access state-of-the-art supercomputers. The result was the National Centers for Supercomputing Applications. NSF then established a high-speed network backbone to connect these centers, which itself became the seed of the high-speed Internet backbone. In 1988, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology (FCCSET) created the National Research and Education Network, a new system that built on earlier projects within NSF, DOE, NASA, and DOD that supported advanced scientific computing and human resource development for computer science. The result was the High Performance Computing Program, which also included an emphasis on communications.

In 1989, OSTP produced a formal program plan for high-performance computing. OSTP provided a vehicle for interagency coordination among the initial players, DOE, NASA, and NSF; the National Security Agency (NSA) has also been an influential player, although not a formal member. Thus, economies of scale and scope could be realized by avoiding duplication of effort across research agencies. Congress passed the High Performance Computing Act in 1991 as a 5-year program. This affirmed the interagency character of HPCCI, which by then had 10 federal agencies participating, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Library of Medicine (a branch of NIH), NIST, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and later, the Department of Education, NSA, and the Veterans Administration.

Originally, HPCCI aimed at meeting several grand challenges, including scientific modeling, weather forecasting, aerospace vehicle design, and earth biosphere research. These goals have since been expanded to "National Challenges," which include digital libraries, electronic commerce, health care, and improvement of information infrastructure (CSTB, 1995a). Overall, the program achieved a number of notable results. The success of some applications and programming paradigms convinced people that parallel computing could be made to work. The program created and disseminated technologies to speed the pace of innovation, enhance national security, promote education, and better understand the global environment (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of some of the results of the high-performance computing effort).

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

1990 and Beyond

The 1990s have seen the continued evolution of computing and communications technology and a changing environment for federal support. The technological side has been characterized by an explosion in the use of computers and the Internet. Personal computers have continued to penetrate businesses and homes. By 1998, approximately 40 percent of U.S. households had at least one computer, and a growing number boasted a connection to the Internet. Building upon decades of federal research and development, the Internet itself emerged as a major force with the number of servers growing exponentially. With the emergence of the World Wide Web and browser technologies (also derivatives of federally sponsored research—see Chapter 7), the Internet has become a medium for disseminating information and conducting business. Companies such as Amazon.com formed solely as virtual entities, and many established firms created a presence on the Web to conduct business.

Development of networking technologies has also created new opportunities for new kinds of computing hardware and software. A number of companies developed and began offering network computers, machines designed specifically for use over the Internet and other corporate networks. Such machines rely on the network for much of their infrastructure, including application programs, rather than storing such files locally. Although it is not yet clear how well such computers will fare in the marketplace, especially as PC manufacturers expand their offerings of low-cost, scaled-down computers, network computers demonstrate the kinds of innovation that expansion of the Internet can motivate.

Component software also emerged as a new programming modality in the 1990s. Epitomized by the Java programming language, component software allows programs to be assembled from components that can run on a wide variety of computing platforms. Applications can be accessed, downloaded, and run over the network (e.g., the Internet) as needed for computations.

Along with these technological changes have come changes in the environment for federal research funding. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union, defense budgets began a slow, steady decline, placing additional pressure on defense research and development spending. At the same time, growing sentiment to reduce the federal deficit further squeezed federal budgets for science and technology generally in the first half of the decade. By 1997, the prospect of budget surpluses gave rise to the possibility of expanding budgets for science and technology spending and renewed attempts to develop a new framework for federal participation in the innovation process. Senator Phillip Gramm, along with Senators Joseph Lieberman,

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

Peter Domenici, and Jeffrey Bingaman, introduced a bipartisan bill in October 1997 to double federal spending for nondefense scientific, medical, and precompetitive engineering research over 10 years (the bill, S.1305, is called the National Research Investment Act of 1998). In early 1998, Congressman Vern Ehlers of the House Science Committee initiated a national science policy study to review the nation's science policy and develop a new, long-range science and technology policy that is ''concise, comprehensive, and coherent'' (Ehlers, 1998).

The structure of federal support for computing and communications also underwent modification in the 1990s. In place of the FCCSET committee, the Clinton administration established a National Science and Technology Council in 1993 to coordinate federal programs in science, technology, and space. Its Committee on Computing, Information, and Communications (CCIC), through the subcommittee on Computing, Information, and Communications R&D, coordinates computing- and communications-related R&D programs conducted by the 12 federal departments and agencies in cooperation with academia and industry. This group has restructured and expanded upon the HPCCI to organize programs in five areas: (1) high-end computing and computation; (2) large-scale networking; (3) high-confidence systems; (4) human-centered systems; and (5) education, training, and human resources. Further, in February 1997, President Clinton established an Advisory Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next-Generation Internet. The committee's charge is to assist the administration in accelerating the development and adoption of information technology that is vital to the nation's future (NSTC, 1997).

Federal support for computing and communications infrastructure also changed in the 1990s. After opening the Internet to commercial use in 1992, NSF effectively privatized the network in 1995. Nevertheless, NSF and other federal agencies are pursuing development and deployment of the Next-Generation Internet (NGI), which will boast data rates 100 times those of the Internet. The NGI initiative will create an experimental, wide-area, scalable testbed for developing networking applications that are critical to national missions, such as defense and health care. Further, starting in December 1995, NSF began restructuring its support of national supercomputing centers, forming a new Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure program. The program will concentrate its resources on two groups of organizations, each with a leading-edge facility and several collaborators. One group, the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure will have the San Diego Supercomputing Center in California as its leading-edge site. The other group, the National Computational Science Alliance, will have the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Urbana-Champaign,

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×

Illinois, as its leading-edge site. The objective is to equip these sites with high-end computing systems one to two orders of magnitude more capable than those typically available at major research universities. They will work in partnership with other organizations that are expected to contribute to access, to education, outreach, and training, and to software development that will facilitate and enhance both the overall infrastructure and access to that infrastructure (Cutter, 1997).

Funding for research in computer science weathered these changes reasonably well with basic and applied research posting real gains between 1989 and 1995 (see Chapter 3). Nevertheless, the research community expressed concerns that such funding may not be adequate to support the continuing growth of the field (and the rising number of researchers in academia and industry) and that the nature of such research is changing. Many researchers claim that federal funding is increasingly focused on near-term objectives and less radical innovation. Calls for greater accountability in the research enterprise, they claim, have led agencies to favor work that is less risky and that exploits existing knowledge, despite its potentially lesser payback. The implications of such changes are not yet clear, but they will become evident over the next several years and beyond.22

Notes

  • 1.  

    Quoted in Edwards (1996), p. 122.

  • 2.  

    As President Eisenhower declared in the 1958 State of the Union message, "Some of the important new weapons which technology has produced do not fit into any existing service pattern. They cut across all services, involve all services, and transcend all services, at every stage from development to operation. In some instances they defy classification according to branch of service."

  • 3.  

    Quoted in Barber Associates (1975), pp. V-51 to V-52.

  • 4.  

    Quoted in Norberg (1996), pp. 40-53.

  • 5.  

    Quoted in Norberg and O'Neill (1996), p. 31.

  • 6.  

    Figure based on data for 1960-1968 in the National Science Foundation's annual Budget Request to Congress (1960-1969) and for 1968-1970 in its annual publication Grants and Awards (1968-1970). Both are available from the National Science Foundation.

  • 7.  

    Figure based on data from the 1968, 1969, and 1970 editions of the National Science Foundation's Grants and Awards for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30.

  • 8.  

    The fundamental discoveries of computability and complexity theory show precisely that the details of the computing machine do not matter in analyzing the most important properties of the function to be computed. The science of computing is the study of the consequences of certain basic assumptions about the nature of computation (spelled out most clearly in Turing's famous 1936 paper), not the study of particular artifacts. Of course, problems arising from the construction and use of actual computers are a main source of questions for the

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
×
  •    

    science of computing, in the same way as problems in the physical sciences and engineering have been a main source of ideas and questions in mathematics.

  • 9.  

    Blue, quoted in Norberg and O'Neill (1996), p. 37.

  • 10.  

    Many of the details contained in this section derive from case studies of the VLSI program and MOSIS contained in Van Atta et al. (1991a), although the interpretation here differs in some respects.

  • 11.  

    Silicon Graphics, Inc. had sales of $3.1 billion and employed over 9,800 workers in 1998.

  • 12.  

    Charles Seitz in a presentation to the study committee, February 28, 1997, Stanford, Calif.

  • 13.  

    In order for the program to benefit U.S. industry more than its foreign competitors, there was a general understanding that investigators would delay open publication of results for roughly 1 year, during which time results would be circulated quickly within the community of DARPA-sponsored VLSI researchers (Van Atta et al., 1991a, pp. 17-10 and 17-13, based largely on comments by Robert Kahn on August 7, 1990).

  • 14.  

    Charles Seitz in a presentation to the study committee, February 28, 1997, Stanford, Calif.

  • 15.  

    John L. Hennessy in a briefing to the study committee, February 28, 1997, Stanford, Calif.

  • 16.  

    Data from "Compilation of Data" from the National Science Foundation's annual Summary of Awards between 1973 and 1985.

  • 17.  

    Personal communication from Gordon Bell, July 1998.

  • 18.  

    Personal communication from Vernon Ross, NSF Office of Budget, Finance, and Award Management, July 1997.

  • 19.  

    Personal communication from Vernon Ross, NSF Office of Budget, Finance, and Award Management, July 1997.

  • 20.  

    SDI budgets for computing are difficult to discern with accuracy, as they were buried within other types of contracts. One estimate is between $50 million and $225 million annually from 1985 to 1994 (Paul Edwards, 1996, p. 292).

  • 21.  

    For a discussion of Ada and its use in military and civilian applications, see CSTB (1997a).

  • 22.  

    The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council has a project under way to document changes in support for information technology research in industry and government and evaluate their implications. For more information on this project, "Information Technology Research in a Competitive World," See <http://www4.nas.edu/cp.nsf>.

Suggested Citation:"4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review." National Research Council. 1999. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6323.
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The past 50 years have witnessed a revolution in computing and related communications technologies. The contributions of industry and university researchers to this revolution are manifest; less widely recognized is the major role the federal government played in launching the computing revolution and sustaining its momentum. Funding a Revolution examines the history of computing since World War II to elucidate the federal government's role in funding computing research, supporting the education of computer scientists and engineers, and equipping university research labs. It reviews the economic rationale for government support of research, characterizes federal support for computing research, and summarizes key historical advances in which government-sponsored research played an important role.

Funding a Revolution contains a series of case studies in relational databases, the Internet, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality that demonstrate the complex interactions among government, universities, and industry that have driven the field. It offers a series of lessons that identify factors contributing to the success of the nation's computing enterprise and the government's role within it.

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