So when I was at the White House in the late 50s, as a response to the humiliation the entire nation felt because the Soviets launched Sputnik, President Eisenhower launched a the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency which would become DARPA and ultimately lead us to the Internet. It was quite a ride for me. I came to the White House when the president still traveled on trains and gave stump speeches from the caboose. I was on some of those trips with him. We used ham radio to communicate with base, which was the White House and the alternative White House (Camp Crystal). I often worked in Camp Crystal, also known as Mt Weather in the mountains of Virginia. And when I say in, I mean deep inside the mountain. It was the alternative just like AJCS was the alternative Pentagon, where I also worked for a time, deep down in a mountain in Maryland.
We also used ham radio to communicate with the president's entourage when he traveled outside of the U.S. We had regular communications but no satellites or cell phones since they were not even dreamed of at that time. Of course we used our own frequencies, but we also used ham frequencies to mask our communications "as-if" no one would be able to figure that out [g]. Most communications was using single sideband radio, which incidentally was rather new at that time, but we also had various pulse modulation systems which were packet multiplexing. The call sign was W3WTE and when not being used for official purposes I would put that Eldico 3,000 watt system on the ham bands and have some fun. Most of the time though I was busy with the business of providing security, both voice security cryptology (KO6 and KY1) and site security and a little of this and a little of that [g].
DARPA was where innovation was happening. The White House was also where it was happening. We were always trying out new equipment and getting use to new procedures and protocols. There wasn't much time to play with ham radio except to pull maintenance on the radios and tweak the antennas, etc. That included putting up some microwave dishes and lining them up for line of sight communications between Camp Crystal and the White House, about 70 miles away.
While I was busy keeping the president's communications encrypted DARPA was busy figuring out ways to keep us ahead of the Soviets. And DARPA became the principal research and development (R&D) agency for just about everything big in the military. Their biggest project may be what they plan to do with trans-humanism - to make the super soldier.
Besides giving us the Internet, they gave us the computer mouse, Berkeley Unix, the computer desktop workstation, large-scale integrated circuits, graphics, human speech synthesis which sounds like human speech. What I used on the old crypto machines in the 50s and 60s did not sound like human speech at all; it was very mechanical. They funded the technology for speech recognition and language translation, global positioning, cell phone technology, night vision, ray and laser guns, the Saturn V rocket, stealth, fuel cells, missiles, ships and particle beam and electromagnetic pulse weapons, robots, AI, weather satellites, and a whole lot of secret technology.
What DARPA does is "accelerate the future into being." That is from their strategic plan. They take science fiction and turn it to science. I never got to meet them (I don't think) but I did see some of their projects when I was working in the War Room at the Pentagon, which came much later in my career - where I worked for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff.
It has been described as DARPA investing in "long poles in the tent," meaning some of those projects will be successful and some may not but they shoot for all of the most innovative ideas and try to make them real.
90% of DARPAs budget is invested in projects outside of government. MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, and a whole lot of academic institutions get funding from DARPA and they do the research. DARPA even funds companies to do the work, which is why we should be pissed when CISCO announces it will become a Chinese company since they received a bunch of funding from DARPA during their start up. Other companies receiving money to start projects were Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics. Any company which got it's start this way should agree to keep their company on American soil. Yea, it pisses me off a lot.
TCP/IP was developed and makes the Internet work no less than Cisco with their routers and strong hubs. I think Ike would be shocked to learn that some of the companies which made billions using funding from the agency he created have moved off shore and there is nothing to stop them and he would do something about it. But nobody else seems to care. Eisenhower had the high ground. CISCO (and VP Chaney's Halliburton which made billions off the war) and some of these other companies who are relocating have the low ground. - But they also have the billions of dollars they made because of DARPA and Ike. And money always wins.