Andrew Russell
Department of History
University of Colorado at Boulder

The ARPANET as an Artifact of Cold War Consensus: 1957-1969

This paper argues that the 1969 creation of the ARPANET – the technical predecessor to the Internet – was a product of Cold War “consensus” discourse between 1957 and 1969. In the wake of the “Sputnik shock” in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress welcomed a vast expansion of U.S. federal government support for research and development (R&D) as a means for confronting the Soviet technological threat. As a result of this post-Sputnik science policy consensus, scientists supported by government contracts enjoyed more autonomy and financial support between 1957 and 1965 than in any other period in American history. Within this “Golden Age” of American R&D, MIT psychologist J.C.R. Licklider created a program in 1961, in the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to support and coordinate academic research in new digital computing technologies that would also improve military command and control. By 1969, ARPA researchers had created the ARPANET, which, in light of this history, should be considered as an artifact of Cold War consensus discourses. The paper concludes by arguing that these “consensus” foundations between 1957 and 1969 account for the persistance of consensus as the dominant technical and political philosophy throughout the history of the Internet.