Eckert & Mauchly's ENIAC 1945

By Bill Rife

Despite well-publicized boondoggles, outrageous earmarks and the liberal elite’s knee-jerk hatred of all things Department of Defense (DoD), massive spending on computer research and development has been the best use of government funds ever. The common thread running through the information highway’s history is that military necessity, however costly, is the mother of invention.

Technology shortened World War II. Formidable German and Japanese engineering had to be reckoned with and the Allies were equal to the task. Radar, proximity fuses in anti-aircraft artillery shells and accurate bomb sites contributed solidly to final victory. The Manhattan Project led to the atomic bomb and MIT’s Radiation Laboratory produced then sophisticated radar systems and electronic microwave devices. Most significantly, the first general-purpose electronic computer was developed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania under U.S. Army contract, beginning in 1943.

Early number crunchers were behemoths, taking up entire rooms. The 1945 ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, weighed 30 tons, consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power. The first mainframe delivered to the Census Bureau March 31 1951 was marginally smaller: 25 x 30 feet, had 5600 CRTs, 1800 crystal diodes, and 300 relays, with nooks and crannies to store your lunch. These Frankensteinesque devices were widely seen as arcane with mystical powers. This was encouraged by inventors Eckert and Mauchly who, as a marketing ploy, festooned their apparatuses with painted light bulbs to evoke a futuristic image. In a 1958 comedy routine, Jonathan Winters offered to put a lovelorn space alien in touch with “the Univac machine.”

THE INTERNET began as a means to maintain military command and control in the event of a nuclear war. ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) scientists wanted to save travel time by linking computers so that someone in Los Alamos, for example, could work on a machine in New Haven without having to be physically there. On October 30 1969 two nodes of an attempted online message from a computer at UCLA were received by another at Stanford. Only the letters “l” and “o” (of “login”) worked their way through the electronic maze, but the ARPANET, which was to become DARPA (Defense Advanced Projects Agency), then the Internet itself , was off and running. Chris Weigant in “From the Pentagon to Monty Python: The Internet turns 40” writes, “The internet’s birth was in the depths of the Cold War, created for scientists to exchange some very hot data-the design and testing of nuclear weapons, for instance. Its transformation from its militaristic beginnings to where it stands now should be seen as the greatest ‘swords into plowshares’ story in the history of mankind.”

In 1993 , enter British scientist Tim Berners Lee with others and, lo and behold, the World Wide Web was invented.

Wherever the internet is now and wherever it’s going, it’s genesis was in DoD spending.

STARWARS: No issue has been as controversial as the role the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)-splenetically dubbed “Star Wars” by opponents - played in ending the Cold War and producing a spectacular technology dividend. Begun in1983, the GAO reported by 1990 that over $16 billion had been invested in research and development of new systems which could make the world a safer place.  Wikipedia tells us “The vast majority of this investment has been made in basic research at National Laboratories and Universities, and these programs continue to be a key source of funding for top research scientists in the fields of high-energy physics, supercomputing/computation, advanced materials, and many other critical science and engineering disciplines: funding which indirectly supports other research work by top scientists, and which would be largely unavailable outside of the defense budget environment.”

This investment was intended for defense but of equal importance, it generated a wave of new technology with applications to almost every conceivable scientific discipline from medicine to saving the environment. Storming Media reported April 11990 “The SDI technological dividend  is detailed in spinoffs and new businesses created by applying SDI technologies to medical, computer, energy, electronics, energy, electronics, aerospace, automotive, and other industrial applications.”  Exponential advances in new sensors and radars, ceramics and metal alloys, and lasers of increased power and accuracy took place. Business Communications Company, a  market research firm, has estimated that commercial marketing of SDI spinoffs by the private sector of the economy could reach  $20 trillion.

 Arguably, the greatest leap forward was in the computer industry.  Innovations in Aritifical Intelligence (AI), Optical computing and Signal Processing, High speed Multiplexing, Monolithic  Optoelectric Transmitters, Electronic Switching, Simulation and X-Ray laser programs were spawned by SDI. High-speed and Supercomputer chips were hardware hallmarks of the SDI era. 

The military buck has been well spent. Let’s hope that’s one buck which doesn’t stop here.