50 Things That Made The Modern Economy

with Tim Harford

Bob Taylor worked at the heart of the Pentagon

Third floor, near the Secretary of Defense

and near to the boss of ARPA,

the Advanced Research Project Agency.

ARPA had been founded early in 1958

but then NASA had largely supplanted it.

Aviation Week magazine dismissed ARPA,

a dead cat hanging in the fruit closet.

Nevertheless, ARPA muddled on

and in 1966, Bob Taylor and ARPA

were about to plant the seed of something big.

Next to Taylor's office was the terminal room,

a pokey little space where three remote access terminals

with their three different keyboards sat side by side.

Each allowed Taylor to issue commands to a far away mainframe computer,

one at the University of California in Berkeley,

on the other side of the continent,

one at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

more than 700 kilometres up the coast,

and a strategic air command mainframe in Santa Monica,

...