The Internet might have no single progenitor, but Licklider’s ability to carry out his vision from Washington, while Baran’s perfectly good idea died on the vine at Rand, underscored ARPA’s unique position in the 1960s. The ARPANET was a product of that extraordinary confluence of factors at the agency in the early 1960s: the focus on important but loosely defined military problems, freedom to address those problems from the broadest possible perspective, and, crucially, an extraordinary research manager whose solution, while relevant to the military problem, extended beyond the narrow
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