The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a U.S. government agency. In the context of computing, it is best known for developing a network (ARPANET) that was a predecessor to what became the Internet.
If it weren't for the cold war, we might not have the Internet. Much of the initial research was done for U.S. defense in order to build a de-centralized network that could survive the loss of many of the underlying nodes. Some claim that this was the U.S. government wanting to build a network that could survive a nuclear attack, though there is debate as to whether or not this was the true motivation. Rather, the real motivation for ARPANET was that network links were unreliable and there was a need to build a network that could allow access to the large supercomputers (of which there were very few) in the event of a network disruption. Either way, reliability was key, and this spurred much development in packet-switching and related technologies that evolved over time to the system we know today. As an interesditn aside, DARPA was instrumental not only in the creation of today's Internet, but also in the use of the "at" (@) symbol in emails which readily defined usernames. The @ symbol was included in email addresses which connected to specific host names. This was patterned after a utilities email which an engineer named Ray Tomlinson designed for DARPA.
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