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Information Processing Techniques Office
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research", was part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.
According to an ARPA-sponsored history of the organization, IPTO grew from a distinctly unpromising beginning: the Air Force had a large, expensive computer (AN/FSQ 321A) which was intended as a backup for the SAGE air defense program, but no longer needed; and it also had too few required tasks to maintain the desired staffing level at its main software contractor, the System Development Corporation (SDC). Accordingly, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering decided to capitalize on these "sunk costs" and SDC expertise by standing up an ARPA program in Command & Control Research. It was accordingly begun in June 1961 with an initial budget of $5.8 million, to include shipping, installation, and checking out the computer at SDC facilities. This new ARPA program was envisioned to "support research on the conceptual aspects of command and control."
Most fortunately, ARPA then hired J.C.R. Licklider away from Bolt, Beranek and Newman to be IPTO's first director. Licklider started work in October 1962, and until his term ended in 1964, he "...initiated three of the most important developments in information technology: the creation of computer science departments at several major universities, time-sharing, and networking". By the late 1960s, his promotion of the concept had inspired a primitive version of his vision called ARPANET, which expanded into a network of networks in the 1970s that became the Internet.
Licklider described how he had re-envisioned command and control research as research into interactive computing as follows:
There was a belief in the heads of a number of people -- a small number -- that people could really become very much more effective in their thinking and decision-making, if they had the support of a computer system, good displays and so forth, good data bases, computation at your command. It was kind of an image that we were working toward the realization of.... It really wasn't a command and control research program. It was an interactive computing program. And my belief was, and still is, you can't really do command and control outside the framework of such a thing... of course, that wasn't believed by people in the command control field.
Licklider quickly set about detaching the program from its sole reliance on a surplus Air Force computer and single industrial contractor. As he recalled:
Essentially what I did on the command and control thing was to try to figure out where the best academic computer centers were, and then go systematically about trying to get research contracts set up with them, aiming for three or four major ones and then a lot of little ones.
Under Licklider's direction, the stated mission of IPTO was:
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Information Processing Techniques Office AI simulator
(@Information Processing Techniques Office_simulator)
Information Processing Techniques Office
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research", was part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.
According to an ARPA-sponsored history of the organization, IPTO grew from a distinctly unpromising beginning: the Air Force had a large, expensive computer (AN/FSQ 321A) which was intended as a backup for the SAGE air defense program, but no longer needed; and it also had too few required tasks to maintain the desired staffing level at its main software contractor, the System Development Corporation (SDC). Accordingly, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering decided to capitalize on these "sunk costs" and SDC expertise by standing up an ARPA program in Command & Control Research. It was accordingly begun in June 1961 with an initial budget of $5.8 million, to include shipping, installation, and checking out the computer at SDC facilities. This new ARPA program was envisioned to "support research on the conceptual aspects of command and control."
Most fortunately, ARPA then hired J.C.R. Licklider away from Bolt, Beranek and Newman to be IPTO's first director. Licklider started work in October 1962, and until his term ended in 1964, he "...initiated three of the most important developments in information technology: the creation of computer science departments at several major universities, time-sharing, and networking". By the late 1960s, his promotion of the concept had inspired a primitive version of his vision called ARPANET, which expanded into a network of networks in the 1970s that became the Internet.
Licklider described how he had re-envisioned command and control research as research into interactive computing as follows:
There was a belief in the heads of a number of people -- a small number -- that people could really become very much more effective in their thinking and decision-making, if they had the support of a computer system, good displays and so forth, good data bases, computation at your command. It was kind of an image that we were working toward the realization of.... It really wasn't a command and control research program. It was an interactive computing program. And my belief was, and still is, you can't really do command and control outside the framework of such a thing... of course, that wasn't believed by people in the command control field.
Licklider quickly set about detaching the program from its sole reliance on a surplus Air Force computer and single industrial contractor. As he recalled:
Essentially what I did on the command and control thing was to try to figure out where the best academic computer centers were, and then go systematically about trying to get research contracts set up with them, aiming for three or four major ones and then a lot of little ones.
Under Licklider's direction, the stated mission of IPTO was: