Foundational Strategic Technologies and Systems

A groundbreaking computer framework known as oN-Line System (NLS) got off the ground thanks to funding from DARPA and the U.S. Air Force. Conceived by Douglas Engelbart and developed by him and colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the NLS system was the first to feature hypertext links, a mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs and other modern computing concepts. In what became known as "The Mother of All Demos," because it demonstrated the revolutionary features of NLS as well as never-before-seen video presentation technologies, Engelbart unveiled NLS in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, to a large audience at the Fall Joint Computer Conference.

In a seminal moment in the emergence of today’s Internet, DARPA’s Robert Kahn (who joined the Information Processing Techniques Office as a program manager in 1972) asked Vinton Cerf of Stanford University to collaborate on a project to develop new communications protocols for sending packets of data across the ARPAnet. That query resulted in the creation of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), most often seen together as TCP/IP. These protocols remain a mainstay of the Internet’s unseen technical foundation.