On 26 Jan 2006, at 16:22, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Actually, the military was definitely involved in UNIX, but not necessarily always directly. Instead, the U.S. military funded these computer research programs heavily, from Bell Labs to UC Berkeley. For example, MULTICS was a DARPA project, (meaning U.S. military).
Just to note, wikipedia isn't always half-right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
Where DARPA's funding of the ARPAnet is explained within the 3- terminal (MULTICS included) origin.
Incidentally, I know guys working on Semantic Web projects at MIT's W3C headquarters who -still- receive grants from DARPA to fund their W3C activities, some of which include working on RDF.
Not only is the US military behind most of the original project that contributed to later arpa/internet and semweb research, but the slack that was supposed to be picked up by the National Science Foundation after the Mansfield Amendment of 1973 (which expressly limited appropriations for defense research to projects with direct military application) was never picked up. This means people are still left with little option but to be funded by them, i.e. -find- military applications of their research.
d
-- David Plans Casal Researcher, UEA Studios d.casal at uea dot ac dot uk http://www.davidcasal.com