(2022-08-25) Ohno SV Funding From Sputnik STEM Edu

John Ohno: everybody sort of knows that DARPA was responsible for funding the research that led to the internet, but what people largely don't know is that this was part of a big chunk of funding approved in 1957/1958 for blue-sky research into improving STEM education.

This same pool of money funded the SOCRATES and PLATO projects at UoI, and over in the ostensibly private sector, some of Alan Kay's work with kids & smalltalk at PARC & some of the bell labs stuff with graphical terminals on unix.

This money was being distributed between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s: in other words, the availability of this money corresponds almost exactly to the period when research into human-computer interaction (HCI) was most innovative and productive.

The DARPA side of this is well-understood & well-documented (see Dealers of Lightning or basically any other book about Licklider), but the other stuff can be pieced together from The Friendly Orange Glow & A People's History of Computing.

The reason it's called "sputnik money": it started right after sputnik's launch, and was the result of the US government panicing that soviet scientists had a multi-generation lead on american scientists.