See below.
At 10:31 PM +0000 7/27/02, olympus-digest wrote:
>
>Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 14:15:26 -0500
>From: "Lee Penzias" <l_penzias@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: RE: [OM] Further on technology (R&D)
>
>You must be thinking of Al G's silly and fraudulent claim ;) No wonder he
>grew a beard and started wearing plaid shirts.
Al Gore didn't invent the internet, though as Senator Gore he did help fund it
in its later years. Funding is not nothing. (For the record, I voted for the
other guy.)
>But government - in any country - did not "invent" the internet. That is
>certainly just not true.
Umm. No, it *is* true. US DoD's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency)
provided all the original funding. Their intent was to build a communications
system that would survive nuclear war, which meant that the communications
system could not be centralized. Because the system had to be able to survive
the abrupt loss of any subset of nodes and links, all nodes and links had to be
able to constitute themselves into a working network without manual
intervention. (There are a number of histories of the birth of the ARPANET,
the predecessor of the Internet, that tell the story.)
>... Or the computers, telephones, or radios, TVs, electric motors,
>refrigerators, light bulbs, airplanes, cameras and film, the motor car, the
>X-ray machines, MR scanners, CAT scanners, rail & trains, fiber optics,
>flushing toilets (nor bidets), the record player, analogue tape, CDs, fiber
>optics ..... or much of anything else.
The idea of the computer was invented outside of government long before it was
really practical with the technology of the day, and the first practical
electronic computers were developed at great expense for codebreaking during
WW2, by and for the government. (Mentioned in "The Codebreakers", David Kahn,
MacMillan 1967, and there are other books more on the computers. Biographies
of Alan Turing are another source.)
The Whirlwind computer system was developed as part of the SAGE air defense
system in the late 1940s to early 1950s. ("From Whirlwind to Mitre -- The R&D
story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer", K.C. Redmond and T.M. Smith, The MIT
Press 2000)
Computer technology then diffused into the commercial world, but for many
decades the government was the largest buyer of computers by far. It's only
very recently that the government's share of the computer market has dropped
below 10%. Before, computers were just too expensive for any but governments
and the largest companies.
Atomic energy is a government invention: the Manhattan Project. (Einstein's
contribution was to prove that it was possible; it took many billions of
dollars of focused effort to make that idea practical.)
>Now, government has certainly put a handle on many such things early on for
>its own ends, with the result that we often only see the tail end of such
>things in the retail stores and incorporated into "services". SOME
>governments are also fond of *insisting* that they have control of certain
>systematic services for [from?] the get go. But let's not equate that with
>"invention" or "expertise" of any sort.
There are many technologies that were first developed for or even by the
government, most often for a military purpose, that later become commercial.
Most often, it's the diffusion of the engineers from government projects into
commercial projects that causes diffusion of military technology into the
commercial world.
Nor is this anything new. Arcimedes developed war engines for the government
of the Greek city-state Syracuse 200 years before Christ:
<http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/contents.html>
>- ----Original Message Follows----
>From: Winsor Crosby <wincros@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: RE: [OM] Further on technology (R&D)
> >
> >It is private persons who do the research and developement - at
> >least in the United States, and in most of the less socialistic
> >nations. Governments are not in the business of invention, design,
> >developement etc.
>
>- -snip
>
> >Lee
>
>Just not true. Please don't rewrite history for political purposes.
>The internet we are communicating on is an example of a government
>invention.
>- --
>Winsor Crosby
>Long Beach, California, USA
>mailto:wincros@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Whose new nickname is "Flamebait"?
Joe Gwinn
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