An agency of the U. S. Department of Defense established in the 1960s, staffed by computer programmers and electronics engineers, to redesign how computers were operated. They developed “interactive computing” to replace (for some purposes) the previous method in which punch cards provided input to the computer, and printouts on paper the output. These were replaced in interactive computing with a keyboard (and now mice and other devices) for input and a cathode ray tube screen (and now other devices) for output. The human could then interact directly with the computer, and almost immediately the computer became a communication device as well as a data processing and computing device.