"$700 ASR-33 terminal beloved of early microcomputer programmers such as Gates and me, which was mainly designed and built for a U.S. Navy contract"
I used one of those ASR-33 terminals too and worked in Cupertino, CA right down the same street from Steve Jobs & Co. I don't remember Steve and Bill asking for billions in government handouts. Much of what you mention are infrastructure projects using proven technology, not the liberals gambling with Billions of our money on unproven technologies that cost five times more than current. (i.e. CSP vs. Natural Gas Turbines) and can only survive off subsidies. On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > Chemical Engineer <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> Government should fund basic research across universites and nail down >> the science ($thousands and $millions) >> Government should fund private, pilot scale projects and R&D grants >> ($millions not $billions) and nail down the scale-up costs, etc. >> Government should back off on Billions in DOE loan guarantees for large >> capital projects and let venture capitalists and major corporations fund >> them. If it is REAL THEY WILL COME. >> > > Somewhere I have a quote from 1840s, when the British and U.S. governments > were subsidizing steamships. I can't find it, but when you change a few > words it said the same thing you are saying here. The government should not > be playing winners and losers. Governments do not understand business. If > steamships are real they will come on their own. Etc., blah, blah. > > I have a similar set of quote for the canals that governments were > building all over Europe and the Erie canal in 1817, and the railroads they > soon subsidized, and the Transcontinental Railroad built with Uncle Sam's > loans in the 1860s, and later the transatlantic cable (mainly a British > government project) the automobile industry, electrification, the highways, > the airports, transistors, integrated circuits, the Internet, the aerospace > industry, weather satellites, nuclear power, and all the other massive > investments made by governments in infrastructure and technology. > > From 1700 to the present day, just about every big-ticket, risky > technology has been subsidized or directly built by the government. I do > not mean the R&D, I mean the physical machinery. In every case, there have > been massive losses in technology that did not pan out, such as the first > two attempts to lay a transatlantic cable. (It was the British government > hearings and funded research that finally fixed that.) There have > been other losses from corruption in things like the Transcontinental > Railroad. > > In *every single case* there has been a chorus of conservative people > saying "the government should not be picking winners and loses. If it is > real, it will come on its own." Maybe they were right, but most of those > technologies might have been delayed by 20 to 50 years. > > In every case, the overall investments made by governments has paid back > many times over. Individual ventures failed but overall the projects > succeeded. The Transcontinental Railroad was arguably the best investment > in history. People had been trying to build it for 15 years before the > Civil War. They were getting nowhere. San Francisco multi-millionaires who > bet $100,000 on poker (in 1855 dollars!) would not invest $1000 in a > railroad going back east. They had too many easy ways to make money to run > any risks. Finally, Lincoln stepped in and funded the railroad, with > massive loans and giveaways. If Lincoln had not done that, it might have > taken another 15 years. > > If the government has not spent millions building ENIAC and the other > early computers, there is no telling when computers might have emerged. If > NASA and the DoE had not poured billions into semiconductors from 1955 to > 1970, it would have take far longer for the industry to grow and for things > like microcomputers to emerge. The government invested huge sums in > dead-end computer technology, and in short-lived but valuable machines such > as the $700 ASR-33 terminal beloved of early microcomputer programmers such > as Gates and me, which was mainly designed and built for a U.S. Navy > contract. > > - Jed > >
