15 Facts About DARPA

DARPA is independent of other military research and development and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management.

In pursuit of this mission, DARPA has developed and transferred technology programs encompassing a wide range of scientific disciplines that address the full spectrum of national security needs.

All modern operating systems rely on concepts invented for the Multics system, developed by a cooperation among Bell Labs, General Electric and MIT, which DARPA supported by funding Project MAC at MIT with an initial two-million-dollar grant.

DARPA supported the evolution of the ARPANET, Packet Radio Network, Packet Satellite Network and ultimately, the Internet and research in the artificial intelligence fields of speech recognition and signal processing, including parts of Shakey the robot.

DARPA supported the early development of both hypertext and hypermedia.

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DARPA funded one of the first two hypertext systems, Douglas Engelbart's NLS computer system, as well as The Mother of All Demos.

DARPA later funded the development of the Aspen Movie Map, which is generally seen as the first hypermedia system and an important precursor of virtual reality.

However, DARPA lost interest in the ASV, after problems with cold-weather tests.

In fall 2011, DARPA hosted the 100-Year Starship Symposium with the aim of getting the public to start thinking seriously about interstellar travel.

On June 5, 2016, NASA and DARPA announced that it planned to build new X-planes with NASA's plan setting to create a whole series of X planes over the next 10 years.

Between 2014 and 2016, DARPA shepherded the first machine-to-machine computer security competition, the Cyber Grand Challenge, bringing a group of top-notch computer security experts to search for security vulnerabilities, exploit them, and create fixes that patch those vulnerabilities in a fully-automated fashion.

In June 2018, DARPA leaders demonstrated a number of new technologies that were developed within the framework of the GXV-T program.

In recent years, DARPA officials have contracted out core functions to corporations.

DARPA has six technical offices that manage the agency's research portfolio, and two additional support offices that manage special projects and transition efforts.

DARPA is well known as a high-tech government agency, and as such has many appearances in popular fiction.