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Oral History Interview with Robert S. Cooper An Interview with ROBERT S. COOPER OH 255 Conducted by Arthur L. Norberg on 3 September 1993 Greenbelt, MD Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Processing University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 1 Robert S. Cooper Interview 3 September 1993 Abstract Cooper discusses his graduate education in electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his interest in computer applications to approach problems in plasma physics. He discusses the types of research supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), and the Department of Defense (DOD) in the 1970s and 1980s. He mentions his move in the early 1980s from DOD to military space research at NASA. Cooper concludes the interview with a discussion of innovative technology in military and space research. This interview was recorded as part of a research project on the influence of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the development of computer science in the United States. 2 ROBERT S. COOPER INTERVIEW DATE: 3 September 1993 INTERVIEWER: Arthur L. Norberg LOCATION: Greenbelt, MD NORBERG: Today is September 3, 1993. I am in the offices of Dr. Robert S. Cooper, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and an assistant secretary of defense during the early 1980s. Dr. Cooper is presently the chairman and chief executive officer of Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation. COOPER: Okay, let's see. My history at MIT started when I went there to graduate school and I did that shortly after I came out of the service. I actually went as a Westinghouse Fellow to Ohio State University and got a masters degree there, applied to MIT and was accepted into their doctoral program. So I went to MIT in the latter part of 1958 and spent four or five years there sort of learning the MIT way which you always have to do if you come from another graduate school, working as a teaching assistant and instructor in the electrical engineering department. NORBERG: How would you describe the MIT way? COOPER: Well, the MIT way is you quickly formulate the conclusion or the answer to a problem and then you try to devise the simplest possible way of describing of how you got to the conclusion. So it's very intuitive. That is, if the solution to problems the MIT way is to know what the answer is and then to devise a very clever way to describe how you get from first principles to the answer. That's the MIT way. NORBERG: What sort of problem did you decide to do this with in electrical engineering? COOPER: Well, I was interested really in more of the physical sciences parts of electrical engineering and I became friends with members of the faculty who were interested in plasma physics which was as that time an interest of those people who were trying to create fusion power, and there were large programs supported by what was the precursor to the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation and there was lots of interest in universities 3 around the country in that and I became interested in that largely because there were some incredibly difficult problems there and they were problems that looked like you could begin to make some inroads into by using computation, and so you could take some of the computers that were just beginning to show up on the campus there at MIT and attack some of the physical problems which were non-linear problems from a computational point of view trying to understand what was going on because you couldn't quite get at it theoretically. NORBERG: Can you describe some of the problem to me? COOPER: Yes, problems of heating plasmas with electron beams, trying to contain them in magnetic fields, trying to find ways to create small scale fusion machines because typically the scale size of a machine required to heat a plasma tended to be enormous and so people were searching for physical ways to reduce the size required of a machine that would heat plasma to ignition temperature and be able to create fusion power from it. NORBERG: Who were the faculty interested in this problem at the time? COOPER: Well, there were quite a number of them. The most famous of them was a man in the physics department named William Allis (?). One of his students named Saul Booksbom (?) later became the executive vice president of Bell Labs. Quite a number of others -- Abe Bers who is still on the faculty at MIT, Herb Woodson (?) who is now on the faculty at the University of Texas, quite a number of folks. Louis Smallen (?) who is still on the faculty at MIT. Then I became interested in that field and worked in that field and did my doctoral thesis in that field. NORBERG: What about graduate students that you were associated with who were interested in this same sort of problem? COOPER: There were quite a number of them. Dick Briggs who is a division director at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and still works in the fusion world. He has become interested in recent years in building large accelerators, and as a matter of fact when I was at ARPA, ARPA was funding at that time a major accelerator project 4 called the Advanced Test Accelerator. Ward Getty worked directly with Louie Smallen and is, I believe, still now at the University of Michigan on the EE faculty, and I've kind of lost track of him so I don't know what his current interests are, but he was interested for many years in that problem of heating plasmas. Dave Whitehouse who was on the faculty at MIT for quite a number of years and then went to work for Raytheon in their research laboratory in Sudbury, Massachusetts. NORBERG: Okay, I was looking for names there that would be part of our little story and didn't hear any. COOPER: No, there really were not many. Two of my associates who were office mates of mine -- one was John Pennhuen (?) who has been working in the defense community for many years but not particularly in the field of computation although he was quite interested in that because he also used computers to work on his doctoral thesis and the only one who finally migrated to the computer industry was my other office mate there, Bill Paduska (?) -- John William Paduska -- and Bill was interested in applying some non-linear random theory that had been developed by Norbert Wiener to magnetohydrodynamic problems which are very similar to plasma problems. And he got so wound up in the computer aspect of what he was doing that he went on to teach computational courses at MIT and then later on he went off and founded Apollo and Prime and later than that a failed enterprise called Stellar Computers or something like that. But he was very successful in the computer business post-graduation. NORBERG: Now, what sort of computation did you do with this problem? COOPER: Well, basically it was looking at solutions to partial differential equations that were non-linear and in geometries that had to do with the containment of plasmas basically, and I was particularly interested in instabilities that developed and looking at how those instabilities developed and why and what the gas dynamics was that was associated with them. NORBERG: Which machine was that on? 704? 709? 5 COOPER: 704, 709, and 7094, finally, were the machines that were there during the time I was there. NORBERG: And this would be done through the computation center I assume. COOPER: That's correct. NORBERG: Now, how did you come to go to Lincoln? COOPER: Well, at that time ARPA was starting up a program -- in the 1960s -- starting up a program in ballistic missile defense. The program was called Project Defender and Lincoln was particularly interested in the problem of viewing entry bodies that had nuclear weapons on them as they came down out of space into the upper parts of the atmosphere and Lincoln was radar-oriented heavily in those days and so it had built up for ARPA a number of instrumentation radars that were sent down to Quadulan (?) Atoll in the South Pacific, and these extremely capable radars for their day were able to collect on magnetic tape the radar observations of these ballistic missile reentries. The tape was about eight or nine feet in diameter. It was a video tape and it ran at about seven kilometers a second during the periods of its fastest run through the tape recording machine, and all of that information was brought back to Lincoln and was digested there and turned into digits, and the physics that was going on in the plasma around these reentry bodies was completely captured in this digital data. I was on the faculty at the time and I consulted out at Lincoln for the group that was looking at the physics of reentry, and the objective there was to determine how to detect from the interaction of the reentry body with the atmosphere which things were candidates to shoot at, that might have nuclear weapons on board, and which things were either decoys or junk, and it turns out that there are fundamental physical principles of the interaction of these different categories of things with the upper atmosphere that one is able to discern by looking at the radar scattering which is heavily influenced by the plasmas that are generated by the bodies as they reenter the atmosphere. So I became interested in that as a physics problem that was similar to the kinds of things that I'd been doing, and I consulted out there for a couple of years -- two or three years -- and was convinced in the latter part of the 1960s as the student unrest got greater that maybe it would be better to pursue my interests out there rather than on the campus and so my center of gravity shifted sort of out to 6 Lincoln Laboratory from the campus during that period of time.
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