You might have noticed in my blog about the stimulus package that President Obama signed into law just recently that it included $400 million to fund the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ARPA-E was created by H.R. 364 within the U.S. Department of Energy and the objective of ARPA-E is cross-disciplinary research on the US’s most
pressing energy challenges. It will fund research that is perceived as
too high-risk for the private sector alone and will bring together
researchers from private industry, universities, and government labs.
ARPA-E is modeled on the well-known and very successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
in the Department of Defense. DARPA was responsible for initiating the internet in 1969, when the DARPA Internet was designed as a network for wartime digital communications. The idea was to create a network that did not have critical nodes (exchanges), in other words, a system that was resilient to the failure of one or more nodes. In 1975, DARPA transferred the DARPA Internet to the Defense Communications Agency. TCP/IP was adopted in 1983 for what was then called ARPANET and is basically what we know today as the Internet. This is a classic example of how government technology funding has created an entire industry.
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