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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (544621)	1/18/2010 1:11:34 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574046

FOS, as per usual, Dave. The head of IBM thought that there might be a market for as many as FIVE computers. The people that developed the CPU didn't have the vision to make the leap to personal computers, - it took hobbyists to do it. And on and on.. Government needs to fund basic research, for which there IS no "payoff" seen. That's ONE of it's functions.

To: i-node who wrote (544621)	1/18/2010 12:05:10 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574046

"For example, YOUR example of computers." Most of the early computers were built on government grants. When transistors, and later ICs were developed, the government was the major consumer of them. In fact, it was because of government programs like the Apollo program and the Minuteman program that ICs became commercially viable. They were the only market for $1000 ICs in the early 1960s and consumed all of the production in the early years.

To: i-node who wrote (544621)	1/20/2010 10:52:13 AM
From: RetiredNow	Respond to of 1574046

Technological breakthroughs happen when private enterprise is sufficiently motivated by market considerations. Too simplistic thinking, as usual, i-node. There are many examples of things our government invented as part of our military or defense organizations that later were privatized and become private enterprise juggernauts. The Internet, super computers, encryption. In fact, I just read that Cisco has demonstrated the first space IP router. Who do you think paid for that? It was a government/private collaboration funded with government money. I agree with you that private enterprise is the engine of our growth and that government should stay out as much as possible, but you are too extreme. There are some leaps forward that only our government has the resources to incubate in order to maximize the probability of success due to the barriers to entry. Renewable energy is one of those. In most cases, the ideal setting is one in which private enterprise is collaborating with government and academia to speed new technology to market. That is why Silicon Valley is so successful. They have this secret sauce down to a science.