What secret technology is DARPA hiding from us?

I want Daryl Hannah. You can keep your android! :smiley:

The forage for food robots worry me a bit. In the old days, when robots were going to take over the world, you could unplug them or wait for their batteries to die. The forage for food robots actually hunt down insects.

Sooner on later, those guys are going to decide to vary their diets a bit (Soylent Green. Yum!).

The most famous DARPA brainchild is almost certainly an early computer network called ARPANET, created to facilitate collaboration among industry and university researchers. That was the beginning of the Internet.

Not quite. ARPANET’s original purpose was to develop a communications network for the military, one which could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. By use of multiple relay “nodes,” messages sent over ARPANET by military commanders could take one of several available routes. If one of the nodes (cities) were wiped out by Russian ICBMs, the message would be able to bypass that relay node and still reach its destination.

The concept eventually became a reality in 1969, and it wasn’t long afterward that it THEN branched out to use by universities and large companies running mainframe computers. (Those in turn mostly ran UNIX, which was developed in the 1970s by AT&T Bell labs operating out of Berkeley, CA.)

Cecil is mostly correct; he simply skipped that first part. I’m surprised that nobody else caught this.

The most famous DARPA brainchild is almost certainly an early computer network called ARPANET, created to facilitate collaboration among industry and university researchers. That was the beginning of the Internet.

Not quite. ARPANET’s original purpose was to develop a communications network for the military, one which could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. By use of multiple relay “nodes,” messages sent over ARPANET by military commanders could take one of several available routes. If one of the nodes (cities) were wiped out by Russian ICBMs, the message would be able to bypass that relay node and still reach its destination.

The concept eventually became a reality in 1969, and it wasn’t long afterward that it THEN branched out to use by universities and large companies running mainframe computers. (Those in turn mostly ran UNIX, which was developed in the 1970s by AT&T Bell labs operating out of Berkeley, CA.) Through the rest of the 1970s and 1980s it was mostly the domain of “geeks” - scientists, military personnel, techies at big companies, and advanced hobbyists among the general population. It really wasn’t until the mid-1990s (with the development of the World Wide Web, a term seldom used anymore) that the Internet took a shape most of us would recognize today. It was a few more years still before it became user-friendly, popular, and easy to access. Really, the concept didn’t truly catch-on among the general public and become truly widespread until around 2000. Back then, something like Facebook would have flopped for lack of interest.

I happen to think that it ranks among mankind’s all-time top ten achievements. A few generations ago it would have been unthinkable; today we can’t live without it.

Cecil is mostly correct; he simply skipped that first part - that it was originally developed by and for the military, not business or research. I’m surprised that nobody else caught this.

What you describe is an Internet legend without basis in fact. See the end of this Wikipedia article for cites:

Close but not quite. What most of us want is the next tab over - the Moller Neuera. A miniature flying saucer (or mega-hovercraft) that glides above the ground. In this case, up to 10 feet. I’d like mine to be able to get up to 30 feet or so. I don’t see any prices or indication that I can pick one up anytime soon though.