Chemical Engineer <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don't remember Steve and Bill asking for billions in government > handouts. >
Those billions were spent when Steve and Bill were children, from 1950 to 1970. In the late 50s and early 60s, as I recall reading that over half of the money going into the construction of semiconductor plants came directly from Uncle Sam, mainly for NASA and military applications. Most of the sales were to Uncle, as well as over half of the capital used to make the product in the first place. Without that investment the minicomputers and later microcomputers would have arrived decades later. Industry would never have spent billions for something that was too expensive for anything other than an Apollo spacecraft. Some of early transistors cost ~$16 to replace a vacuum tube that cost a nickel. No company in its right mind would develop something like that for a commercial application. They were developed as quickly as possible, ignoring the expense, for nuclear weapons and Nike missiles guidance systems. The government also paid for most of the development of computers in ENIAC and in later projects such the MIT Project Whirlwind, and the NORAD computers, all of the early supercomputers, and SAGE which were later developed into the SABRE airline reservation system, the first big real-time distributed computer. > Much of what you mention are infrastructure projects using proven > technology . . . > You have that backwards. It was not proven until the government invested billions in it. Especially in: canals, telegraphs, ocean going steamships (not rivers), airplanes, highways, computers, semiconductors, nuclear power and aerospace, especially rockets, which are nowhere near proven even today. Airplanes were particularly dangerous and unsuited to civilian use, and would have remained that way for decades had it not been for massive government investments during WWI and in the 1930s. - Jed
