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The article focuses on the strategic computing initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the U.S. DARPA was founded to promote research in areas relevant to military problems and to make advanced technology accessible to the military community. Throughout DARPA's history, most of its budget has been allocated to ordnance and aerospace technology. However, it has always recognized that information processing is vital for the military and historically has allocated about 10 percent of its budget to computer science. Although relatively modest by DARPA standards, this funding has been critical for the computer science community and the major source of funding for research. Over the years, DARPA has supported many influential projects in computer science at major U.S. universities and research laboratories and is now the largest single source of funding for computer science in the U.S. In the fall of 1983, DARPA announced a 10-year plan for its Strategic Computing initiative, a plan to develop machine-intelligence technology. INSET: STRATEGIC COMPUTING.