Funding a Revolution Government Support for Computing Research (1999) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review
4 The Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Review
Pages 85-135
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From page 85... ...
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.
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A fledgling commercial computer industry emerged, led by International Business Machines (IBM) (which built its electronic computer capability internally)
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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.
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'l'hese projects proved Instrumental m establlsnmg 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.
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ONR supported Whirlwind, MIT's first digital computer and progenitor of real-time commandand-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~.
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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.
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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~."~ RAND specialized in developing computer systems, such as the Tohnniac, based on the IAS computer, which made RAND the logical source for the programming on SAGE.
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"' (Tomash, 1973~. ERA built a community of engineering skill, which became the foundation of the Minnesota computer industry.
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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)
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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.
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From page 98... ...
It also established a critical organizational infrastructure and management style: a small, highquality 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~.
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From page 99... ...
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~.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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. Kahn developed two major strategies to achieve his goals: the Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits program and the Strategic Computing Initiative.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The VLSI program became increasingly focused on semiconductor devices. Main elements of the program included computeraided design and manufacturing technology, test and evaluation tools, and implementation and testing technologies, including ongoing support for MOSIS.
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lapan'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.
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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.
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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)
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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~.
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127 be o ~ U ¢ ·E~ ~ ON ON Lr)
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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.
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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~.
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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.
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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.
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Personal computers have continued to penetrate businesses and homes. By 1998, approximately 40 percent of U.S.
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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.
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6. Figure based on data for 1960-1968 in the National Science Foundation's annual Budget Request to Congress (1960-1969)
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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.
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