[ih] Review: Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley"

[Dave Crocker]

On 7/4/2018 9:46 AM, Eric Gade wrote:
> No bait here, just a poor choice of words. I meant only the end of the 
> period where people who had worked on ARPA projects had easy access to 
> funding for longer (than present) durations. I meant nothing negative 
> about the actual people, but was referecing the end of the funding 
> environment in which they were allowed to work. I suspect (and could be 
> very wrong) that it's not a coincidence that the sweetheart deal for 
> PARC came soon after the passage of the Mansfield amendments. In that 
> sense it was something of a "last gasp" in that computing research would 
> not be funded again in the same way.
> 
> ARPA people have, of course, done interesting and important work since 
> that time, and I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I do, however, wonder what 
> would have emerged if the funding culture had persisted.

Eric,

Many thanks for the clarification.  Now I can see the substance you 
intended.  It seems a clear point, though doesn't match my own recollection.

My initial view was from a couple levels below those getting the funding 
and doing the research. (I can't comment on any possible effect of the 
Mansfield project.)

My view is that some folk from the Arpa community got enticed by an 
extremely interesting offer to create and work at PARC, but that the 
ARPA funding and effort in digital communications continued in parallel 
for quite awhile. At some point this could be classed as a transition to 
Internet work, but in terms of the point you are making, I'd class that 
as the same community working in relatively the same space.

Certainly there was continuing IMP and TIP and protocol working going 
through the 70s. And I was part of an ARPA funded arpanet-email-for-unix 
effort in the latter 70s, by way of offering a particularly mundane example.

There was the Arpa-to-NSF funding transition for operational issues, but 
I don't know any of the details. (Others here, of course, do.)  What I 
was told that Arpa finally noted that it didn't have a mandate to do 
straight operations and its research demonstration project -- the basic 
Arpanet -- was itself no longer research. This made so much obvious 
sense, in terms of Arpa's mission, that I'd never have thought other 
forces were a concern.

Note also that through at least the 70s, Arpa did related projects 
besides the Internet development, namely packet radio and packet 
satellite.  All of this suggests continued, robust funding from Arpa for 
work in the same technical space.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net