ARPA Does Windows: The Defense Underpinning of the PC Revolution
In: Business and politics: B&P, Band 3, Heft 3, S. 213-237
ISSN: 1469-3569
The Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) has aggressively and persistently supported technologies key to the personal computer (PC) revolution. Uncovering this political-economic link provides an important corrective to the popular lore surrounding the origins of the PC. In their emphases on private sector initiative and entrepreneurial risk-taking, conventional PC histories conform to orthodox market-based explanations of technological and economic progress. In contradistinction, this article "brings the state back in" to the PC realm of apparent market purity.