Military, Government, and Tech

Thoughts on Military and Government in Tech

A lot of the press cycle and social media commentary today centers around Big Tech's role in military applications. While stories like Google ending its ban on AI weapons and deportation policies potentially boosting Palantir's stock get endlessly rehashed, it's worth stepping back and looking at the history of how the U.S. Government and its military policy have been a driving force in the development of tech, and literally foundational Silicon Valley itself. You may already know that DARPA created the internet as an experiment in packet-switched networks to make US defense networks more resilient to nuclear attacks. The relationship goes much deeper than that, sometimes influencing the people changing the world for generations.

The Radio Research Laboratory Makes Stanford a Tech Hub

During WWII, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was tasked with developing technology for the war effort. Among other things, they founded the Radio Research Laboratory, spun out of the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, to research and develop radar, countermeasures, and communication systems for the military.

However, while the radio research lab was founded at Harvard, it was directed by Frederick Emmons Terman. Terman was a Stanford Professor. When the war concluded, he returned to Northern California and was appointed dean of the Stanford School of Engineering. In 1951, he spearheaded the creation of the Stanford Industrial Park.

Lockheed Corporation Helps Found Silicon Valley

The first major company to locate in the Stanford Industrial Park was Lockheed Corporation. Lockheed had established itself as a major defense contractor during WWII. However, as the Air War transitioned into the Space Race, it needed to move beyond its Burbank R&D facilities to capitalize on the microprocessor-intensive field of guided rocketry.

Steve Blank -- yes, that Steve Blank -- wrote: "By the early 1960’s Lockheed Missiles Division in Sunnyvale was quickly becoming the largest employer in what would be later called Silicon Valley. Along with its publicly acknowledged contract to build the Polaris Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM), Lockheed was also secretly building the first photo-reconnaissance satellites (codenamed CORONA) for the CIA in a factory in East Palo Alto."

"When we set out to create a community of technical scholars in Silicon Valley, there wasn't much here and the rest of the world looked awfully big. Now a lot of the rest of the world is here." - Frederick Terman

Sequoia's Don Valentine Launches (Missiles, Metaphorically)

Sequoia Capital's first investment was Atari. From there, they would go on to invest in Apple, Oracle, Cisco, EA, Google, YouTube, and many others.

But their founder, Don Valentine, actually got his start selling semiconductors. Where did he sell them? Valentine started as a Sales Engineer at Raytheon. From there he would go on to work at Fairchild Semiconductor and National Semiconductor, both of which were selling heavily into defense contractors. Fairchild, in particular, made semiconductors for the B-70 bomber and the Minuteman ICBM.

The First Supercomputer, Built on Fire Control Computers

The world's first programmable electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, was initially designed to compute ballistics tables for artillery – essentially, calculating trajectories. This required significant capabilities in numerical integration.

In one of the first feats of programming abstraction, the methodology of wiring the ENIAC was adapted. Instead of physical reconfiguration for each problem, the machine could be programmed using input derived from the structure of the ballistics tables themselves, allowing symbolic instructions without changing the wiring.

“The ENIAC was at first (1945-1946) controlled by wiring as if it were a gigantic plug board, but in time Nick Metropolis and Dick Clippinger converted it to a machine that was programmed from the ballistics tables, which were huge racks of dials into which decimal digits of the program could be set via the knobs of the decimal switches.” - Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn.

Other Notable Defense Contractor Connections

Andy Grove, who co-founded Intel and popularized OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), previously worked at Fairchild. John Doerr learned Grove's OKR management style while working at Intel and later brought it to Google via Kleiner Perkins, where he also invested in Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Sun, Amazon, Intuit, and Google.

Steve Wozniak of Apple, which Valentine's Sequoia would invest in, initially moved to Cupertino from Michigan because his father, Jerry, worked at Lockheed.

Both of Jeff Bezos's maternal grandfathers worked for Sandia National Laboratories. That's how his parents met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sandia is a US Department of Energy lab focused on national security (including nuclear weapons). Bezos's maternal grandfather would later go on to work for DARPA, contributing to projects including the development of the internet.

Al Gore, Marc Andreessen, and the Web's Development

This isn't strictly about military investment, but the story has relevant resonance, especially given recent events like a16z hiring Daniel Penny partly for his perceived alignment with certain cultural narratives, to work on their aerospace and defense initiatives.

Many might dismiss the "Al Gore invented the internet" line as a joke or a misunderstanding. While hilariously untrue in its literal sense, Gore did play a role in fostering the environment that led to the web as we know it.

When he was a senator, Al Gore championed and passed the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. This act funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). While working at NCSA, Marc Andreessen co-created Mosaic, one of the first widely used graphical web browsers.

Andreessen later left to co-found Netscape. Perhaps more impactfully in the long run, Microsoft licensed Mosaic's source code to build Internet Explorer. The name "Mozilla," later used for Netscape's open-source browser project, reportedly stood for "Mosaic Killer" (a play on "Mosaic Godzilla").

Later, Andreessen co-founded a16z with Ben Horowitz, investing in Facebook, Github, Pinterest, Twitter, Skype, and many more tech giants.

Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but it's interesting to consider where Marc Andreessen and the subsequent evolution of the web might be today without the start provided by the government funding Gore helped secure via the High Performance Computing Act of 1991.

Conclusion

The narrative often presented today suggests a recent, perhaps reluctant, entanglement between Big Tech and the military-industrial complex. However, as these examples illustrate, the connection isn't new; it's foundational. From the very geography of Silicon Valley shaped by defense contractors like Lockheed, to the early careers of influential figures like Don Valentine and Andy Grove, to the government-funded research that spawned critical technologies like the internet and the browser, the U.S. government and military have been deeply intertwined with the tech industry's origins and growth.

Understanding this long and complex history is crucial for contextualizing current debates about AI in warfare, surveillance technologies, and the role tech companies play in national security. It reveals that the relationship isn't a recent deviation but rather a continuation of a pattern established over decades. The "move fast and break things" ethos of Silicon Valley grew from soil tilled, in large part, by government contracts and defense spending. Acknowledging this history provides a more nuanced perspective on the responsibilities and trajectory of the tech sector today.

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