Everyone who knew him called J.C.R. Licklider “Lick.” A slightly built, intellectually-restless Midwesterner, born in St. Louis in 1915, Lick earned separate degrees in physics, math, psychology, and psychoacoustics (the science of the perception of sound). He worked at Harvard, designing better communication channels for Air Force crewmen in clamorous bombers; at MIT, helping create a national air defense system against the Soviet Union; and at BBN, an architectural acoustics design firm, developing the first computer timesharing system.

In 1962, Lick joined the Advanced Research Projects Agency-ARPA-of the United States Department of Defense, where he would help invent the Internet.

Founded in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, ARPA’s role was to foster the civilian space program and later screen new military technologies. But a fresh director, Jack Ruina, had bolder plans: he wanted to predict-and implement-the innovations of the future. Independent from the onset, ARPA would henceforth “be anathema to the conventional military and R&D structure and, in fact, be a deliberate counterpoint to traditional thinking and approaches.”

So empowered, Ruina and his successors hired civilian visionaries rather than career military employees to head ARPA’s most important projects. Though the overall Department of Defense budget dwarfed ARPA’s, the latter’s tiny staff meant each employee controlled 100 times the typical financial authority. Project-based contracts were three to five years to ensure fresh thinking and focus on specific results.

“The end of each project is the end,” a white paper summarized. “It may be that another project is started in the same technical area, perhaps with the same program manager and, to the outside world, this may be seen as a simple extension. For [ARPA], though, it is a conscious weighing of the current opportunity and a completely fresh decision.”

Lick, for example, transformed ARPA’s “Command and Control” department, then largely a war game simulator, to the “Information Processing Techniques Office,” charged with coordinating computer research among ARPA, corporate contractors, and Stanford, UCLA, and Berkeley universities. To do so required what Lick jokingly called an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” His vision  “everybody could use computers anywhere and get at data anywhere in the world.”

The network, first deployed in 1969 as ARPANET, grew to 46 members by 1974, and 213 by 1981, at which point one new host joined approximately every twenty days. In 1983, the U.S. Military formed a separate network, MILNET. Soon after, ARPANET, long since international, became known simply as “the Internet.”

Crucial underpinnings of high-tech design, manufacturing, and transportation-in short, the fundamental elements of the contemporary supply chain-owe their origins to ARPA. As do the world’s most advanced x-rays and radars, fuel systems and satellite communications, lasers and microprocessors. Today, called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the organization still employs a slim technical staff of only 140, each of whose program managers directly control part of a $2 billion budget for a term of four to six years. Current projects directly relevant to tomorrow’s supply chain include weather-forecasting supercomputers and self-forming, self-defending computer networks; alternative energy sources and low-cost titanium; auto-detection of suspicious sea vessels and the development of unmanned vehicles. In this last category, and typical of the agency’s maverick approach, is its public “Grand Challenge” competition, to be held this November 3, in which “autonomous ground vehicles”-no human driver, no remote control-must maneuver a mock city complete with moving traffic, tight circles, busy intersections, as well as unexpected obstacles. The winner will receive $2 million.

Do past successes predict future performance? “Not necessarily,” acknowledged current director Tony Tether. “This research is technically bold. Some of it will succeed, some will fail, and some will go in directions we cannot foresee.”