Gerry,
Sorry I don't have time to do your post justice today. I won't even be able to speel check this post :-)
All I can say is I think reality departs a little in this case from your ideology.
#1) We can indeed predict something about what other inventions might have been made without the government intervention in science and engineering of the 1940s to 1960s.
Previous to this intervention, science and math education was at a low level, swamped by the liberal arts. Since Nixon started cutting the science education and research budgets, the science literacy level has retraced a great part of that curve.
When I was in high school in the 1960s, both government and industry helped out the science budget of the tech school I attended. You could get college extension courses in computers, chemistry, physics and other areas. We had chemistry labs donated by Reynolds Metals and electronics labs donated by Tectronix and Intel. They got tax deductions and career employees out of that.
You could get 5 years of math and 5 years of chemistry and physics. Organic chemistry, even nuclear chemistry was being taught to 16 year olds. Ditto for electronics and computer science, at which time computer hours were over a hundred dollars per hour.
On top of that, you had to have at least a year of either German or Latin to graduate (this was before most papers were written in english.)
I'm talking about high school here!
It was directly the federal government that encouraged me in programming, gave me the classes, and provided the equipment. Later, they funded the research projects I initially worked on - for instance, the first computerization of ICU heart monitors, funded by NIH. Now without the targeted funding they deliberately used to create the technically literate class that invented workstations and the internet and so forth, there would have been very few alternative technologies invented at the same level of competence. Unless the Japanese or Russians had done it, in their very similar and competitive programs.
Government direction has been a part of even pre-computing, with the government funding in the late 1800s of tabulation via punched cards.
Babbages machine went without any funding from capitalists for a hundred years. the the government put up the money for the beginnings of a follow up.
The invention the CRT display, emf-free keyboards, television standards, satellite technology, microcircuits, the successful regulation of the communications systems, tcp-ip, encoding systems, compression technology, the Internet. All winners picked by the people you think are incompetent.
You should read the autobiography of the ex-chairman of IBM who was chairman in the 1940s and 1950s. He explicitely stated that although they were already in the tab machine business, they saw no future in general purpose computing. The government had to fully fund the first several machines they built, and they didn't even consider going into production then until other customers, encouraged by the government to do so, started placing orders.
The fact is the government has a very good record in this area. the notable exception is that the security forces keep getting involved in the design stage and hosing things up. But thats not because they don't understand the potentials. They just, in my opinion, have too aggressive and oblivious an agenda.
#2) We should avoid doing anything to MSFT that results in several hundred billion dollars dissappearing from the economy. Like idealistic schemes for throwing them out to compete with each other having no proprietary products at all for the individual resulting companies, and their subsequent bankruptcy. I say this not as an ideologue but as a businessman who has had to meet a payroll.
Cheers,
Chaz |
