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DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the agency that eventually morphed into the Internet, is celebrating its 50th birthday tonight in Washington, D.C.

In Monday’s Washington Post, Stephen Barr writes that DARPA “pulled together researchers who created the blueprint for the Internet.” The organization also “sponsored the inventor of the computer mouse (the first was carved from wood and had one button).”

DARPA is a part of the U.S. Department of Defense, created way back in 1958 as a technological solutions group prodded into action by the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, history’s first satellite. Since then, DARPA has been responsible for pioneering much of the forward-thinking technology that the military has needed over the past decades. And, not surprisingly, much of that technology has found its way into the lives of everyday Americans in recent years.

Of course, the history of all the events and people that came together to create the Internet is much more detailed than this one organization, but it is true that it provided the foundation, without which the World Wide Web would not exist as it does today. DARPA created the concept of computer networking, which of course is the very foundation of today’s Internet.

Mr. Barr tells us more about the organization:

Unlike most federal agencies, DARPA operates with little red tape. It has only two management layers, encouraging the rapid flow of ideas and decisions.

About 240 people work at DARPA, and 120 of them are program managers and office directors on appointments of four to six years. The agency does not own or operate labs, but sponsors research carried out by industry and universities.

By rotating technical professionals every few years, DARPA has “a constant freshness of people and energy,” Tether said. “Everything else we do stems from that.”

One of those short-term managers returning for Thursday’s anniversary dinner is Lawrence G. Roberts, who led a DARPA team that designed a network that evolved into the Internet. He made some of the key decisions in 1967, when he was 30. As Roberts described it, “Putting A and B together and getting Z. Taking obscure things and seeing there is an intersection there.”

He hopes that DARPA will always be able to focus on innovation — “working on something that should change the country and generate the economy shift that the Internet did.”

Read the entire article here.