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Internet was from DARPA Turing machine was from WWII to crack Enigma NASA advances (including CPU chips) were from the Cold War I love private development su

• SiempreViernes 5y ago
  Turing published his paper in 1936, so well before the war. The idea of a computer itself is usually set at the analytical engine by Babbage, whose main motivation was to aid with nautical navigation (a mainly civilian use). Even more fundamentally: the military picked up Turing after the war started, so they had a good idea of what he could so because of work he'd done for others than them. Granted, without the military we wouldn't have had the specific computers the military built, but in this context that is about as interesting as saying that without the military we wouldn't have had the innovation of the 150 mm high explosive shell. Likewise, Tsiolkovsky did his theoretical work in a log cabin because he wanted to reason about space travel. Robert H. Goddard invented the liquid fuelled rocket in the interwar years working largely alone and in any case without any military support. Again the military shows up after stuff is very clearly moving. Like, how is it surprising that an organisation that needs to pay for guns and the training of the people to use them would mostly invest in already existing prototypes?