“DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983–10199331ya”, 2002 (; backlinks; similar):
During 1983–10199331ya, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent an extra $2.4$11993 billion on computer research to achieve machine intelligence. The Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI) was conceived at the outset as an integrated plan to promote computer chip design and manufacturing, computer architecture, and artificial intelligence software. These technologies seemed ripe in the early 1980s. If only DARPA could connect them, it might achieve what Pamela McCorduck called “machines who think.”
What distinguishes Strategic Computing (SC) from other stories of modern, large-scale technological development is that the program self-consciously set about advancing an entire research front. Instead of focusing on one problem after another, or of funding a whole field in hopes that all would prosper, SC treated intelligent machines as a single problem composed of interrelated subsystems. The strategy was to develop each of the subsystems cooperatively and map out the mechanisms by which they would connect. While most research programs entail tactics or strategy, SC boasted grand strategy, a master plan for an entire campaign.
The SCI succeeded in fostering substantial technological successes, even though it never achieved machine intelligence. The goal provided a powerful organizing principle for a suite of related research programs, but it did not solve the problem of coordinating these programs. In retrospect, it is hard to see how it could have. In Strategic Computing, Alex Roland and Philip Shiman uncover the roles played in the SCI by technology, individuals, and social and political forces. They explore DARPA culture, especially the information processing culture within the agency, and they evaluate the SCI’s accomplishments and set them in the context of overall computer development during this period. Their book is an important contribution to our understanding of the complex sources of contemporary computing.