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You could apply this to everything in life and conclude that nothing matters. What is important is that Xerox PARC did invent many of the technologies we take f

• trhway 13y ago
  >You could apply this to everything in life and conclude that nothing matters. it matters "locally" - to individuals who invent and innovate and to ones who gets direct financial profit from it. The rest of civilization will get it anyway, at the time when civilization is ready to consume it, so details don't matter at that scale. Ancient Greeks could in theory build a steam engine [granted very low efficient] - they wouldn't have been able to put it use anyway, it would be just a curiosity like Aeolipile was.
  • svantana 13y ago
    It's probably hard to tell in most specific cases, but it can be argued that some inventions were just ready to happen (e.g. the telephone and it's race to the patent office) while others may have taken decades longer if the right genius hadn't been in the right place at the right time (Einstein's relativity perhaps?)
  • nnq 13y ago
    It matters more than locally: those invention seeded the minds of the next generations, showed them what could be possible. It's not as if Gates and Jobs didn't hear about the work done at PARC. They most likely did and it "seeded" their minds or at least primed them for their ideas. Even if they didn't do even this, they at least confirmed them that their intuitions were on the right path, and without these confirmations they maybe wouldn't have even had the courage to start their businesses. And if the ancient Greeks would have actually built that steam engine into a useful device (even something like a powered fishing lines drawer of anything of even the slightest usefulness), I'm sure this would've completely changed the course of human history, even if they may not have found too much practical use for it. You see, once you physically build something that works and is useful (or actually implement something that can be used, in the case of software), no matter how inefficient and barely-useful it is, you actually seed and idea into the minds of all the people that see that device working or hear about it working. And that idea takes roots and very soon they will think about improving it and finding uses for it. If you just write about it in a book, even if you add building instructions and careful calculations showing that it's possible, you get at most 1% of that mind-seeding power. Most peoples minds get primed to work on improving something only after seeing something that (at least kind of) works. It's the "if we'd only tweak that and that it might just actually really work" thinking that most people can only have after seeing something physical that at least "barely kind of works". Very few people have the intelligence and imagination to get a theoretical idea and turn it into something that works, but there always some Gates or Jobs or Wozniaks that once you give them a piece of practical vision they can carry it on to something that really works. I think that if the ancient Greeks would have build a steam engine with even the most remote practical use and would've displayed that "craftmanship" to the people instead of keeping it locked in library, the whole middle ages with all their horrors might not even have existed. Humanity might have even jumped from antiquity to industrial age directly. Maybe with a slow languish at first, before something equivalent to the printing press would have been invented to help the dissemination of knowledge, but then faster and faster.