Tech

The government's top scientists built some of the most amazing technology we use today

Paul Szoldra, pzdupe1, and pzdupe2

2016-01-25T19:44:00Z

Many of the staples of modern technology we take for granted have roots in the military's research and development arm.

Created after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) makes investments and conducts research into game-changing technologies with national security implications. Just this week, the agency announced planned funding for military cyborgs.

While the agency's breakthroughs on cyborgs or stealth technology may not have obvious civilian applications, much of DARPA's past research does.

Whether you're using the Internet or GPS, you have some of the government's top scientists to thank.

Most of the functions of computing we often take for granted originated with DARPA back in the 1960s.

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart showed off a revolutionary computer known as oN-Line System (NLS) in a presentation now known as "The Mother of All Demos." The crowd was blown away by never-before-seen tech, like a computer mouse and graphical user interface.

In his 90-minute presentation, Engelbart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) — helped with funding from DARPA and the US Air Force — floored the crowd in San Francisco.

Their NLS system laid the groundwork for Xerox PARC's Alto computer that came five years later (Steve Jobs used Alto's innovations to help build the Macintosh).

The NLS was the first computer with:

— a mouse

— a graphical user interface

— hypertext links that users could click on for more information

Source: Darpa

A collaborative document creation tool called "The Journal," essentially a primitive precursor to modern Wikis or Google Docs, also came out of NLS,

Source: Stanford University

You can also thank DARPA for the internet. The agency established ARPANET in 1969 using technologies that are the foundation for the internet we know today.

Source: Darpa

The ability to zoom in on Google maps and virtually walk streets has its roots in a DARPA-funded team at MIT.

The team beat Google to the street view business by three decades with its "Aspen Moviemap."

In the 1970s, the team mounted cameras on cars and drove around Aspen, Colorado, and then combined it with other data, still photographs, and audio.

With all this data on laserdisc playing back on a computer screen, a user could touch the screen to pan the camera around and travel throughout the city of Aspen.

"Its goal was to create so immersive and realistic a 'first visit' that newcomers would literally feel at home, or that they had been there before," said Andy Lippman, who worked on the project. "DARPA realized the need after Israeli soldiers practiced for the recovery of an airplane hijacked to Entebbe by using an abandoned airfield made up to look similar."

Source: Michael Naimark

Though Google Earth now lets you zoom in anywhere on the globe, overhead satellite imagery was uncharted territory until a joint DARPA-CIA satellite photo-reconnaissance program of the 1960s.

Though it suffered initial setbacks, the Corona satellite imagery program scored a huge success in August 1960 when a canister of film was recovered from it loaded with troves of pictures taken over the Soviet Union.

The program gave the CIA crucial intelligence that paved the way for other, more advanced satellite imaging and mapping solutions.

One example is a company called Keyhole — which the CIA invested in during the 1990s — that built software called EarthViewer 3D. It gave spies plenty of insight into what was happening around the world.

It also caught the attention of Google, which bought it in 2004 and renamed it Google Earth.

Sources: Darpa/Tech Insider

Speaking of satellites, your nightly news weather forecast powered by satellite data came out of a prototype that DARPA created in 1958.

Source: Darpa

And the GPS in your car or on your phone traces its lineage back to Transit, the first satellite navigation system, mainly built for the Navy's ballistic missile submarines.

One of the agency's more recent developments is in onion routing, a way to remain private and safe while browsing the internet.

Initially developed in the mid-1990s by US Navy researchers, the idea of onion routing later received funding from DARPA.

The idea behind an onion network is to wrap internet traffic in multiple layers of encryption (layers like an onion) by sending it to different places before reaching its final destination. Instead of directly accessing Google.com for example, onion traffic would pass to five or six different sites before it got to Google.com, hiding where the original user was coming from.

This would would later develop into the Tor Project — a "dark web" where privacy activists, journalists, and even criminals could hide their online footprint. The project still receives funding from the government.

Source: Onion-Router/The Tor Project

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