Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: *"A government school to make everyone a programmer will fail. It has been > tried thousands and thousands times only this year and it never succeeded. > "* >
I do not know who said that, but it is completely ridiculous. Totally false. It is just the opposite! The U.S. Government invented computers and trained the first thousand or so programmers and other experts. I mean people such as Adm. Grace Hopper, the staff at ENIAC and the IAS, and my mother. The government paid for the first 10 or 20 computers. Nearly all of the early luminaries in both hardware and software were trained by the government or at government expense in projects such as MIT's Whirlwind. Nearly all early computers were purchased by national laboratories and the U.S. Census Bureau, where my mother was one of the first people in the world to use them. In the early 1960s, the three largest computer users by far were the U.S. military, U.S. national labs, and the Census Bureau. They had more expertise and they purchased more machines than any industrial company of that era. The specifications for virtually all supercomputers such as the UNIVAC LARC were spelled out by government experts, and the machines were purchased exclusively by the government. The LARC architecture introduced many important breakthroughs. Most breakthroughs in computer hardware such as core memory, semiconductors and hard disks were paid for by Uncle Sam, or done with close participation by government researchers, or under government contracts. The Internet, which is the most important computer application yet invented, was designed and implemented by U.S. government programmers, and paid for entirely by the government, until very late in its development. Apart from IBM, no organization contributed more to the development of computers than the U.S. Government. The British, French and Japanese governments also made major contributions. - Jed
