Originally appeared in the Computer User

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Ever get the feeling technology hasn't turned out quite the way you hoped? Think how the armed forces must feel.

Mainframe computers were virtually invented by the Allied military forces in World War II. The reason was that war had changed in the modern era. No longer was it just about armies meeting on battlefields and duking it out. In the world of industrial war, battles were waged by pushing buttons, launching missiles, dropping bombs, breaking in the quickest possible time codes created by the most ingenious schemes the other side could devise. We needed machines which could make those complicated battle calculations, plus plot intricate invasion plans and manage supply lines. And the armed forces had the money, manpower, and conscripting authority to have the machines made.

The names of those first computing machines ring down to us through the years. Germany made the Enigma code-making machine; Britain countered with the code-cracking Colossus, and America with its Bombes.

By war's end ENIAC, the first all-purpose computer was up and crunching. Soon after, EDVAC, the first stored-program computer financed by the US Army, also financed by the Army, was running batch routines. John von Neumann's IAS computer, very important because the operating model underlying it underlies every computer in the world today, was underwritten by the Army and Navy. In England, the British military sponsored the Mark I and EDSAC projects.

Some of the smartest people in the world were put to work on these projects. Some went on to fame in other pursuits. Some of the "best and the brightest," the whiz kids of the Kennedy administration, were part of the effort, including Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Lewis Powell, who would serve on the US Supreme Court, was a member of a top-secret wartime codebreaking team at Blatchley Hall in England.

McNamara went on to have an illustrious career as the brainiest of the bunch, but it his reliance on intelligence put him, more often than not, on the wrong side of important issues. The idea of the push-button war in Vietnam -- our advisors and machines would turn the tide for South Vietnam -- was his. Later he would head up Ford Motor Corp. where his best idea was the unprofitable Ford Comet, versus the less cerebral but more visceral Lee Iacocca's Mustang muscle car.

By the late 1960s, big-iron thinking led to a doomsday project at the Department of Defense. Devisers of nuclear war scenarios, who spent entire months clustered around CDC 6600's playing war games, much as today's kids plunder the treasures of Zork, were troubled. They worried that if a hydrogen bomb went off in St. Louis, it would have a disruptive effect on the command-and-control network within the armed forces.

So the DoD created a group with the mission of devising a way of communicating that could "communicate around" nuclear blasts. This group concocted a protocol which broke messages down into little packets. When the messages were sent from one computer to another, they would disintegrate into a spray of packets, disperse and go their different ways, bypassing Saint Louis if need be, and reform again, in the proper order, at the designated destination.

The group was called ARPA, for Advanced Research Projects Agency. The protocol came to be generically known as Internet Protocol, or ftp. Through the 60s and 70s, this ARPAnet or "Internet" was used primarily as a communications link for university and defense research entities.

Just as the computer outgrew the army, so did the Internet. The armed forces still maintain a heavy presence on the Net, but rest assured, top-secret discussions do not occur via Netscape Communicator. The irony is that security problems have virtually driven sensitive military communication off the Internet, isolating it from the society it is sworn to protect.

In 1983 Soviet Chief of Staff Nikolai Ogarkov told the New York Times that America would ultimately defeat the Soviet Union for supremacy, and the reason was our computers. The Soviet government had always been afraid of the free flow of information that computers represented. Where better information strengthened the US, it undermined the Soviets' position with its own people.

Speaking of isolation, flip ahead another 20 years. Seventeen-year Navy veteran Senior Chief Petty Officer Timothy R. McVeigh, no relation to the mad bomber of the same name, was ordered dismissed in January for listing "gay" among his interests in his America Online profile. By month's end, Mcveigh was reinstalled with full rank and privileges, with the Navy and AOL shocked, just shocked at the invasion of privacy. But the damage was done. If you listened carefully, you could hear the sound of servicemen around the world powering down their systems.

We expect the jackbooted gavotte of tyranny from America Online, but it is dismaying to see it from our own armed forces. And it is so odd that after all the military's sensational triumphs -- vanquishing Hitler, trouncing the Soviet Union, transforming Iraq into a plain of unsorted aggregate, and coining the dread oxymoron military intelligence -- it still comes up short with that elusive commodity.

Marshall Ogarkov was right. The free flow of information is inconsistent with a totalitarian regime. After inventing big computers only to see their day pass, after inventing the Internet and then fleeing from their own invention, the people who protect our freedoms by curtailing them are at it again.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.