Fifty-six years after UCLA computer scientists made history by sending the first computer-to-computer message to the Stanford Research Institute, over 300 miles away, another important message is being transmitted from the basement lab in 3420 Boelter Hall.
“I can’t emphasize how important the government's strong funding was,” says professor emeritus Leonard Kleinrock, who led the UCLA team that night, ushering in the birth of the internet. The project, called ARPANET, or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was funded by the federal government, which invested in university faculty and graduate students to power progress and secure the United States’ technological superiority.
“Out of ARPA, [which was] funding people in this wonderful funding culture, came many of the technologies you enjoy today,” Kleinrock says in the video above.
In the mid-1960s, when the ARPANET project was launched, federal spending on science made up nearly 2% of U.S. gross domestic product, an all-time high. Then as now, much of that federal support flowed to academic scientists, including at UCLA, where faculty and students put it to work solving problems in consequential fields like medicine and technology. It would be hard to overstate the return on that investment — from medical breakthroughs that have saved millions of lives to technologies that are now so ingrained in our daily lives it’s hard to imagine life without them.
