The Government Didn't Build That!

According to government mythology, the world owes the existence of the internet to the government, and computer communications would not exist today without the government thinking up the idea of computer networks.  This fairy tale is usually based on the claim that the first network using the technology used in today's internet was built for the government agency Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).  It leaves out the inconvenient fact that ARPA's computer network was built not by government bureaucrats, but by Bolt Beranek and Newman, a private-sector firm in Massachusetts.  The proponents of the government narrative typically suppress the role of BBN and also remain silent about the state of computer communications in the early 1960s.
BBN not only built the network for ARPA, but also came up with the details of how to build it.  According to Dave Walden, a member of the BBN team that built the network, they submitted a "fairly detailed design, including initial hardware designs, a software architecture and fairly detailed initial timing analysis, principles of system operation, and so forth" as part of the bid.  Walden also writes how BBN preemptively prepared for the bid even before the Request for Proposal was put out by the government.

While I don't remember the exact dates, I think by 1968 Robert Kahn, who was aware that there would be a competitive procurement for the ARPANET backbone of IMPs, had convinced BBN management that BBN should prepare itself to bid on this procurement when it came out. BBN pulled a team together under the supervision of Frank Heart that included Bob, Severo Ornstein, me and perhaps others to think about what we would bid once the Request for Proposal came out from the government. In 1968 the RFP did come out and a number of people from throughout BBN helped draft and review the proposal.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/the_government_didnt_build_that.html#ixzz2BuSc7wGh