[ih] infrastructure history [was: who invented the Internet]

[John Levine]

>The cover story was the need for a transcontinental railroad to get at 
>the pockets of people in the expanding West.

My, we're cynical.  The Internet is one in a long line of technical
developments that were done partly by private entities with a big help
from the government, with a fairly straightforward public interest
motivation.

Railroads in the populated east were built entirely with private
money, overbuilt in many areas.  In the largely empty west, the
government gave large subsidies in the form of land to the railroads.
While this certainly made many of the promoters rich afterwards
(something the students at Stanford University likely still
appreciate), I don't think it's a huge leap to see why there'd be a
public interest in making it possible to get people, goods, and mail
from one side of the country to the other reliably in a week rather
than unreliably in several months.

For the airline industry, military money for technology and post
office money for routes kick started commercial aviation.  Civil jet
transport started with the 707 and DC-8, both of which were designed
both for civilian use and as military tankers, with the 707 borrowing
a lot from the B-47 and B-52 bombers.

So it really shouldn't be surprising that the government funded the
packet switching experiment that turned into the Arpanet.  It was a
high risk high reward project that private sector (AT&T mainly)
weren't going to do.

R's,
John