[ih] misc questions about 1970s/1980s contracts and funding

[Karl Auerbach]

On 2/2/22 3:41 PM, Jeremy C. Reed via Internet-history wrote:
> I am trying to understand contracts and funding from around 1970s. early
> 1980's such as from National Science Foundation, U.S. Department
> of Energy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DoD) ARPA Order,
> IBM fellowships, etc.

I'm not at all sure that my comment below is relevant to your query or 
not...  But the point I try to make below is that sometimes funding 
sources were obfuscated, intentionally.

When we were working at SDC during the 1970's (I was in Clark Weissman's 
security department) we got funded from several sources for network 
stuff.  Most was not classified, some was. The dividing lines were vague 
and quite subjective (and this was in an era when the cold war was 
glowing with heat.)

We worked on lots of contracts, mostly various US agencies ranging from 
the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ... well ... lots of groups associated with 
US security (even now, all these decades later I still feel the lash 
that would come from mentioning their names, much less the specific 
projects.)  Also with RSRE in the UK (that was fun - got to work with 
Donald Davies for little bit.)

On a big multi-level security contract (both for operating systems and 
networking) I never saw the actual paperwork but I did see the 
bill-of-lading stickers on the equipment I was buying.  (I bought a many 
truckloads of PDP-11s of various sizes.)  The real customer for whom we 
were working was not listed on the labels (they kinda liked to keep 
quiet about their three letter acronym in northern Maryland.)  Rather 
everything was marked as coming from the US Army.  And even I knew that 
we weren't working for the Army.

	--karl--