Who paid for the foundations

A subject the papers are about. The loosest grouping, and the one to reach for last.

Works whose own copy names a defence or nuclear funder — Project MAC, ARPA and DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Army Ordnance, the Atomic Energy Commission — on a title page, in a footnote, or in a closing acknowledgement. The line is printed on the page and appears in no catalogue record, so this grouping exists only because the copies were opened.

Fifty-five as of 2026-08-31. The description previously said forty-four, which was true when it was written; the set has grown and the number had not been revised with it. The accompanying finding — that a third of the set was found only after the search moved past the first leaf — was measured against that smaller membership and has not been recomputed, so treat it as a fact about how the search went rather than as a current proportion.

What makes the set worth having is that its membership criterion is physical. Nothing here can be assembled from metadata: a catalogue record does not carry the funding line, so every member was established by someone opening the file and reading past the title. That also means the set is a lower bound and always will be — it holds the works whose copies have been read, not the works that were funded.