Perhaps it was just incredibly fortunate for us that those people—Licklider,
Kahn, Cerf and others—were in a position at a special time to make a dream come
true. They had the ways and means to spend money, and spent it pretty wisely.
Everything the pioneers did wasn’t successful—a big, expensive time-share
project at MIT/Bell Labs fizzled. But like commercial ventures, what was
successful was spectacularly so.
Perhaps the founding of the Internet was something like the founding fathers of
this country, the constellation of minds formed at just the right moment, with
just the right sensibilities. Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with which
kind of organization, commercial or governmental, is the midwife.
Pamela -
I do think these convergences are interesting and suspect that they are
relatively robust... if one of the "founding fathers" had been absent
for whatever reason, it seems likely that our history might have been
almost identical... another of the "fathers" might have championed that
missing person's pet causes... changing only the attribution, not the
fact of those elements? Perhaps.
Technological growth/evolution seems similarly robust. Most of us
probably read descriptions of new technology being invented every day
and think "I thought of that 10 years ago!", which isn't the same of
course, as doing it, but I'm pretty sure that anything that *I* thought
of has been thought of by at least 1% of the tech population as well.
So as low probability as that might be, it is not low frequency... the
niche is (apparently) there begging to be filled!
- Steve
On Mar 4, 2014, at 2:50 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote:
On 3/4/14, 11:33 AM, glen wrote:
Although I haven't participated, I think we can learn quite a bit from the
outright generosity shown by Kickstarter participants.
To me it is important to believe there are things inherently worth doing, and
that there is someone that wants to do them and a means to get them done.
With government funding and venture capital, the money is mostly controlled by
certain types of people with certain types of values. Those kinds of people
won't pursue the diversity of possible innovations, and they aren't the `best'
in any absolute sense nor `deserve' the control they have. They are just fit
for their environment. So to me it's no more generosity than donating to a
political campaign, it's just that these technical campaigns actually might
modify the world slightly, should they succeed.
Marcus
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