ARPA and DARPA and Not

                                  ARPA and DARPA and Not

The Spectator has an article on Dominic Cummings’s plan to hype the British economy through the creation of another ARPA. 

The first Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in the US in 1958. The previous year the Soviets had launched the world’s first artificial orbital satellite, Sputnik. The thought was that only if the US immediately copied the brilliant engineers who ran the Soviet Union could the West hope to keep up. What emerged was the basis for digital technology.

In his 2002 book Digital Culture, Charlie Gere reveals that crediting those inventions to ARPA isn’t so simple:

‘The first head of XeroxPARC was Bob Taylor [of] ARPA’s computing research arm… The Mansfield amendment and the presence of Taylor at XeroxPARC meant that many talented computer scientists and researchers who had been ARPA-funded were drawn to the Centre [ie, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center].’

The Mansfield amendment was the amendment by which Senator Mike Mansfield, in 1973, stopped ARPA from doing any further pure research. Thereafter it was to be limited only to applied defense work. Its name subsequently changed to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) 

The article called the amendment "infamous." There is an interesting argument over the success and productivity of focused research programs rather than those more free-range.

The researchers streamed out of ARPA to the private sector and XeroxPARC, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, to create all of those technological advances. So it was only because the U.S.’s ARPA was depopulated that the U.S. pioneered today’s tech revolution.

What model is Mr. Cummings advancing?