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All of us tech people have the military to thank for the creation of this industry, lest anyone forgets.
by schainks 3y ago
All of us tech people have the military to thank for the creation of this industry, lest anyone forgets.
- iso8859-1 3y agoWhat do you mean? The first computer (the Antikythera mechanism) had nothing to do with the military.
- atlasunshrugged 3y agoI think this is in reference to how important the defense industry has been to Silicon Valley in particular. For example, Steve Blank has this lecture on the Secret History of Silicon Valley https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
- schainks 3y agoI have attended this lecture in person, it was amazing and informative.
- peteradio 3y agoSurely the greeks were simply using the Antikythera to find more tribes to war with.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y agoOff the top of my head, in this space DOD invented: CPUs/registers, random access memory, packet switched networks, internetworking, TCP/IPv4. I’m sure there’s more.
- icegreentea2 3y agoMore directly, ENIAC was literally designed and commissioned to calculate ballistic trajectory of shells.
- adrian_b 3y agoDoD did not really invent anything, but they have financed the research required to invent things according to their requirements, without which the things enumerated by you might have been invented only decades later. All the modern semiconductor industry, including the discovery of transistors and of solar cells, has its origin in the research done during WWII, mostly at Bell Laboratories, to make improved detectors for the military radars, which lead to the development of the technologies needed to make pure germanium and pure silicon and of semiconductor diodes made with them. Without DoD money, an electronic computer of the complexity of ENIAC would have been built only many years later. Nevertheless, both ENIAC and the British cryptographic electronic machines (and the Atanasoff computer) have been enabled by the invention of various kinds of electronic digital counters during the decade that has preceded WWII (mostly in UK), all of which had been invented for the use in experiments for the study by physicists of radioactive substances and of cosmic radiation, so there are also decisive civilian contributions (like also the discovery of nuclear fission as a precondition for the nuclear bombs and reactors).
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y agoThis seems like a very semantic difference, bordering on pedantry.
- schainks 3y agoSo you're saying my original comment could be clarified to something like, "you have the US and UK taxpayers to thank for this industry, lest anyone forgets"?
- HideousKojima 3y agoSteel was made in India thousands of years ago, that doesn't mean the development of the Bessemer process didn't create the modern steel industry.
- krapp 3y agoSo because the Department of Defense invented packet-switching networks fifty years ago, we owe them fealty? Respect? Hitler designed the original Volkswagen Beetle. Who cares? All of us tech people used to know a fascist when we smelled one, now some of us lick their boots for a paycheck.
- schainks 3y agoFealty is acknowledgment of loyalty, which is not what my my post suggests at all. If you were the son of a fascist, would you not still tell people the truth about your dad even if you told him to shove it long ago?
- krapp 3y agoIf I were the son of a fascist, I would tell people the truth that my father was a fascist. If people were complaining about the influence of fascism on, say, the footwear industry, I would not tell people the truth that my father invented those plastic things on the ends of shoelaces (that are called aglets and whose true purpose is sinister) because that would come off as an apology for fascism. That DARPA invented one small part of what would become the internet half a century later isn't germaine to criticisms of the influence of the government, intelligence or military on that internet. Silicon Valley has always been in the pocket of the military industrial complex, but most of the tech industry, to say nothing of tech and hacker culture, isn't from there and doesn't need to worry about biting the hand that feeds it.