And that would be a misconception. Computers that talked to each other long pre-dated DARPA.
completely irrelevant. the modem is the merely the last step in puzzle. and yes, i know, my dad always talks about having modem access from his high school back in the 70s. but the internet is something so much more than that. its about how you take lots of heterogenous, unreliable networks all over the world and link them together, allow users from one to tunnel through 5 or 10 intermediate networks - maybe all using different network protocols, data representation, hardware from different vendors - to get to their destination. and how you do it reliably, when networks and links go down all the time. how you do it with adequate throughput. how you layer applications on top it. if it had been begun in the private sector, it would have been one grand socialist experiment, since it was all about me letting you use my network resources in any way that you want, with the understanding that i won't snoop or tamper with your data.
anyway, its not a myth. the private sector did produce competition to the internet. AOL is a prime example. a private network. the internet won out in the marketplace because of its global distributed nature, which also distributes costs and increases reliability. but the research needed to get there is something you're ignoring. consider even something as simple as DNS, the domain name service. out of all the computers out there, how do you find the one that wants to call itself investorshub.advfn.com?
A bunch of government employees reinvented the wheel, and their bureacratic overlords with too much time on their hands had to rewrite history in order to justify their own agencies' funding. That's where the typical public education history comes from.
yes, but not the government. the government supplies the funds and gathers the experts. the experts do peer review on proposals for research. it is a system that works, at least for NSF and NIH. DARPA and the national labs are substantially different, but they really do need to serve defense and national security. but there is still a fair degree of peer review involved.
there was actually a clandestine CIA project that siphoned every penny that the big-three got for hybrid research and dumped it all in Toyota's account; that's how hybrids got off the ground. Tongue firmly in cheek, of course.
hybrid research is not blue-sky research. its a question of how you make incremental changes to stuff you have to address present problems. look how little time it took american car manufacturers not only to duplicate but also to bring to market a competitive product. this is not what i'm talking about. i'm talking about things like nanotechnology, gene therapy, advanced robotics research. what company has the resources to investigate how you might build hoards of simple robots that can coordinate amongst themselves and gather information or perform simple tasks with dexterity? but defense has a motivation to explore this (battlefield reconnaisance) and so does energy (nuclear plant cleanup).
Most people would have completely missed emergin opportunites; that's what makes those opportunities so profitable for those who recognize them for what they are.
i think not, i think you would have been impressed. my dad talks of using a Xerox Alto and a Xerox Dorado in grad school, and says that the WISIWIG editor was completely smooth and usable, and that the performance never a problem.
The political process is a terrible way of discovering what's worth researching. The steam engine must have been discovered and rediscovered more than half a dozen times in human history before it finally powered industrial revolution as we knew it.
i agree. which is why peer review is the answer. politicians clearly screw this up. look at how easily mccain and palin dismiss earmarks for scientific projects to low-brow audiences. heck, palin was arguing for special needs children and she proposed to pay for it by cutting earmarks for genetic research into fruit flys. on the surface that may sound compelling but if you're a scientist you'd say its an instance of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
That's what makes it all the more tragic when capital resources are taxed away and destroyed on unprofitable pursuits motivated by politics and collective dumbness.
agreed entirely.
but there is something else that you have to consider. just like there is a public insurance system, and then there is a government catch all for those who are otherwise uninsurable. that makes sense because the public sector does what it does. the government provides the safety net. and they deploy the safety net using a similar paradigm, to better manage the risk.
the public sector doesn't invest heavily in high-risk/high-payoff ventures with a long time frame. without government support, the internet would probably not have happened. the human genome project. supercomputing vendors would all have disappeared. particle physics would be dead. half or more of our mathematicians would be gone, and there'd be as many pure mathematicians in the world as poets, all the rest doing applied math.
anyway, to say government has no role is false. to say that politicization of the process is bad is certainly true. and we've seen so much more of that over the last 8 years, as the budget of NSF has been cut and the direction that DARPA has taken has been significantly narrowed.
