On February 7, 1958, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy issued DoD Directive 5105.15, establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The agency was later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its creation came in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launches, which had shaken American confidence that the United States led the world in science and technology.
ARPA’s first research thrusts were space technology, ballistic missile defense, and solid propellants. The space mission soon moved to the newly created NASA, and ARPA repositioned itself around advanced, high-risk research that other parts of the defense establishment were not pursuing. That reorientation made room for the agency’s later and lasting role in computing.
The founding matters to the history of artificial intelligence because ARPA became one of the most important early funders of the field. Within a few years it had created the Information Processing Techniques Office, which channeled money into interactive computing, time-sharing, and the AI laboratories at MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon. The same office funded the ARPANET, the direct ancestor of the internet.
The 1958 directive set up an institution whose influence on computing far exceeded its original space-and-missiles brief. Decades of AI research, from early symbolic systems to the self-driving car challenges of the 2000s, can be traced in part to funding lines that began with this single founding document.