re: #237 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

“not done much” in comparison to the trillions that have been spent on defense…and we could have developed an Internet for civilian purposes just as well.

We could have, true. But we wouldn’t have. AT&T didn’t want to get involved in the internet because they were afraid it would compete with them. Who would have launched the communications and navigation satellites without NASA, whose role in sending men to the moon was to prove we could park an ICBM anywhere? And where do you think we’d be with the computer had the government not spent the boatloads to fund IBM’s development?

A large chunk of our $15T/yr economy is due to defense spending.