DARPA's Big Hits

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency fosters military technology. But much of its research has fueled big advances in commercial areas as well

GPS

DARPA co-funded the original satellites used for GPS in 1960. By the 1980s its research helped miniaturize GPS receivers, making them portable and inexpensive enough for use in everything from automobiles to cell phones.

COMPUTER MOUSE

An agency-sponsored researcher named Douglas Engelbart invented the now ubiquitous device in 1964. The original model was made of wood and had a single button.

INTERNET

DARPA developed the military network, the ARPANET, from which the Internet later emerged. Launched with four connected sites in 1969, it eventually linked universities and think tanks before an international network was commercialized in the mid-1990s.

UNIX

In the 1960s, the agency funded the further development of the computer operating system known as UNIX, which remains in widespread use today by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others.

PARALLEL COMPUTING

In the 1990s, DARPA funded research into a technology that breaks apart highly complex problems into pieces and solves them in parallel. It is now commonly employed in high-performance computing.

Data: DARPA, BusinessWeek