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> It's like saying if engineers had wheels and engines laying around everywhere, nobody would have thought of connecting them together and making a car without
by Chathamization 10y ago
> It's like saying if engineers had wheels and engines laying around everywhere, nobody would have thought of connecting them together and making a car without a government grant.
But they didn't. I mean, if government projects lag behind private sector projects, why didn't we have ARPANET going nowhere while some private sector project jumped ahead? Even if you think we would have gotten their eventually (debatable), we can at the very least say that the government project got us there sooner.
- WalterBright 10y agoAs I said, the first thought anyone with two computers had was connecting them together. It's not a big step from that to inventing yet another protocol, which happened all the time. There wasn't anything miraculous about it. Local networks run on the Ethernet protocol, developed by Xerox, and shows that an excellent network protocol does not require a government grant. And without Ethernet, there would have been Token Ring by IBM, or Token Bus by GM.