The co-founder of Adobe Systems Inc. said Tuesday that the U.S. is "lagging behind" in computer-science research, but government-funded programs could lead to the same type of innovation that resulted in the precursor of today's Internet.

Speaking to the Rotary Club of Salt Lake City, John Warnock said India and Japan have "a lot of our best researchers." But he said that a large-scale organization — similar to the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which built ARPANET, the Internet's precursor — could produce technologies to tackle large-scale problems.

"A lot of innovation still happens in the United States, but it's not through the type of funding of research that happened back in those days," Warnock said, noting ARPA's heyday in the 1960s, when it funded several university research labs, including one at the University of Utah.

"It's typically contained in companies," he said. "The Internet is helping that. The Internet, by having open-source programs and sharing that information, is helping keep that alive, but I think if we're going to really do well in the field of energy, we need an ARPA-style organization to build energy research."

Warnock recalled ARPA's advancements developed at its "centers of excellence," including the one at the U., which brought together the "best and brightest" from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University and other universities to work on computer development. Many U. researchers went on to start companies that became technology giants.

"It was an amazing time then, and I think the lesson that can be learned from all of this is that the way the research was funded and the way the research was done was unique," Warnock told a crowd of about 130. "If you look at the National Science Foundation, it is little pieces of money to individual contributors. ARPA decided to build these 'centers of excellence,' and the result of that is most of this computer technology we know today. I think the reason that the U.S. is so far ahead in most aspects of computer science was because of the direct impact of this government funding of advanced research in the United States."

Research also reached a high point at the Palo Alto Research Center, started by Xerox and using "the best of the ARPA community," he said. Xerox "skimmed" the best computer scientists and gave them freedom and a lot of money. For example, PARC had PCs with mail systems and text editors four years ahead of the introduction of the home PC in 1982, but Xerox struggled to turn its developments into a commercial success, he said.

Part of ARPA's success can be attributed to none of its information being classified, allowing researchers to share what they had developed, and not requiring researchers to spend a lot of time writing long, cumbersome reports, he said.

"So it was 'hire the best people and let them run' ... and that's exactly what happened," Warnock said. "It worked brilliantly."

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