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With the exception of HyperCard, all those other “giant” technologies were also developed at research institutions whose purpose has been questioned many times:
by zamfi 3y ago
With the exception of HyperCard, all those other “giant” technologies were also developed at research institutions whose purpose has been questioned many times: UMN (Gopher), IBM Research (SGML), MIT (FTP).
That the Web was “inevitable” doesn’t mean that it would have happened without public research support. The public, open web exists b/c of academics and industrial researchers hacking on a weird global network infrastructure funded primarily by governments.
The same thing is happening now with AI: academic and industrial research labs have been incubating these ideas for decades, and you can paint OpenAI as irrelevant (Google invented the Transformer architecture!) but someone makes these things happen each time they happen.
Sure, we could have had the web without CERN — but would we have had the web without any of these research institutions?
- kortilla 3y agoYou’re shifting the goal posts though. The question wasn’t about funding research, it was specifically about high energy physics.
- zamfi 3y agoAm I, though? The grantparent post was about fundamental research producing results in other areas, and then the parent post complained that the invention of the Web would have happened with or without CERN. I don't think anyone is really arguing that we needed a high energy physics lab in order to invent the Web -- and I'm pointing out that those other inventions that didn't happen at CERN also happened in fundamental research labs of various types.