4 ms·

Backrub, and its creators, were clearly government funded: "1996 - Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a sear

by robg 15y ago

Backrub, and its creators, were clearly government funded: "1996 - Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub." http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html "BackRub is a research project of the Digital Library Project in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University." http://classic-web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/backrub.stanford.edu/backrub.html http://classic-web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/backrub.st... "The Stanford Digital Libraries project is one participant in the 4-year, $24 million Digital Library Initiative, started in 1994 and supported by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA." http://classic-web.archive.org/web/19971210113151/diglib.stanford.edu/ http://classic-web.archive.org/web/19971210113151/diglib.sta... That's a huge initiative, especially in 1994, supporting many, many grad students like Larry and Sergey. There's a strong claim that without the research funding, we wouldn't have Google.

pg 15y ago
That's why I put the "really" in there. It was government funded in the sense that any side project people work on in grad school is government funded, since the government is paying their living expenses. If that makes the startup a spinoff, Apple was a spinoff of HP, because Woz was still working at HP when he started designing the Apple I.
- robg 15y ago
  A $24M project, over 4 years, at six universities is exactly supposed to encourage creative innovation among the next generation and surrounded by domain experts. That initiative was designed to produce projects like Backrub. Was Woz's job description at HP written to specify novel hardware? Was he surrounded by mentors and other employees hired to support that initiative? Across six departments?

4 ms·

Backrub, and its creators, were clearly government funded: "1996 - Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a sear

by robg 15y ago

pg 15y ago
That's why I put the "really" in there. It was government funded in the sense that any side project people work on in grad school is government funded, since the government is paying their living expenses. If that makes the startup a spinoff, Apple was a spinoff of HP, because Woz was still working at HP when he started designing the Apple I.
- robg 15y ago
  A $24M project, over 4 years, at six universities is exactly supposed to encourage creative innovation among the next generation and surrounded by domain experts. That initiative was designed to produce projects like Backrub. Was Woz's job description at HP written to specify novel hardware? Was he surrounded by mentors and other employees hired to support that initiative? Across six departments?