Timeline: Sputnik and Three Decades of DARPA Hegemony

This timeline accompanies our feature story Happy Birthday, Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet). Please click through to that story for more about DARPA’s past and present role in developing key technologies.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency laid the foundations for an astonishing number of today’s technologies. Click through the years in the timeline below to see what was developed when, and by whom.

1955: President Eisenhower announces a plan for the U.S. to launch a 3.6-pound satellite.

Oct. 4, 1957: A Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile launches the world’s first artificial satellite, the 183-pound Sputnik I.

December 1957: A Vanguard test rocket, intended to launch the first U.S. satellite, explodes on the launch pad.

Feb. 7, 1958: In response to Sputnik, President Eisenhower establishes the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense.

March 1960: J.C.R. Licklider publishes the landmark paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which anticipates by many years the development of time sharing, the Internet and other information technologies.

July 1961: Leonard Kleinrock at MIT publishes the first paper on packet switching,”Information Flow in Large Communication Nets.”

October 1962: ARPA establishes and lavishly funds the Information Processing Techniques Office and appoints Licklider its director.

Early 1963: Douglas Engelbart, a little-known researcher in human computer interaction, wins ARPA funding for development of an “electronic office.”

July 1963: Licklider gives $2 million in ARPA funds to MIT to start Project MAC, a computer science research laboratory.

1963: Ivan Sutherland, a graduate student at MIT, writes Sketchpad, a landmark in human computer interaction and the first program to use a graphical user interface.

1965: ARPA funds development of Multics, a time-sharing operating system, at MIT’s Project MAC.

1967: Larry Roberts at ARPA publishes his plan for the ARPAnet, a network to link widespread government agencies and universities.

December 1968: Doug Engelbart demonstrates his oNLine System, partly funded by ARPA, to the Fall Joint Computer Conference. It debuts the mouse, hypertext links and other technologies.

1969: Multics morphs into Unix at Bell Labs.

October 1969: The first ARPAnet host-to-host message is sent from Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA to Engelbart’s lab at Stanford Research Institute.

1971: Ray Tomlinson writes the first e-mail program to operate across networks. The first message is sent between two machines that are located side by side but connected only through the ARPAnet.

March 1972: ARPA is renamed DARPA. (The name will change back to ARPA in 1993, and it 1996, it will once again return to DARPA.)

Early 1973: DARPA begins funding the “internetting” project, whose goal is to link packet-switching networks of various kinds.

Spring 1973: DARPA’s Bob Kahn asks Stanford University’s Vinton Cerf to help him design new communication protocols for the ARPAnet. The TCP/IP protocols they develop are still used in the Internet today.

1977: Bill Joy, a graduate student at Berkeley, releases first version of BSD Unix.

1981: Andy Bechtolsheim and Forest Baskett demonstrate the “Stanford University Network workstation” that will become the Sun-1 workstation.

February 1982: Bechtolsheim and fellow Stanford graduate students Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy join Berkeley Unix author Bill Joy to found Sun Microsystems.

1982: James Clark founds Silicon Graphics based on ideas from DARPA-funded research. DARPA pours $93 million into VLSI research.

1983: Partly in response to Japan’s Fifth Generation computer program, DARPA launches the 10-year, $1 billion Strategic Computing Initiative. It is aimed at artificial intelligence, chip design and new computer architectures such as parallel processing supercomputers.

1984: DARPA awards $4.5 million to Thinking Machines Corp. to build a 64,000-processor supercomputer based on DARPA VLSI principles.

1986: The National Science Foundation debuts NSFnet, the first major Internet backbone.

August 1987: In response to market share losses to Japan, 14 U.S. semiconductor makers form SEMATECH to improve manufacturing techniques. The following year Congress will authorize DARPA to contribute $100 million over five years to SEMATECH.

1988: A National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn a member, publishes “Toward a National Research Network.” It influences Sen. Al Gore and ushers in national, interconnected high-speed networks.

1990: The ARPAnet is decommissioned.

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