[ih] ARPANET and Apollo 11

[John Day]

Are you sure it was WWII or was it really the Civil War?  

It was what they learned about logistics and production in the Civil War that provided the expertise for building the transcontinental railroad,  the Panama Canal, etc. And in 1910, Sears-Roebuck built a plant on 40 acres on the outskirts of Chicago (this was when they had no brick and mortar stores) that was filling a 100,000 orders a day and moving 1,000,000 items a day. It was after Sears and before WWII that Taylor was doing all of his motion studies to improve production. Actually Ford came to look at Sears to apply to his factories. Those methods were in place until at least the 1960s when they were computerized but the suspicion is that they are still there, just in the machines.  From what I understood about WWII, it was mainly taking methods already in use in other industries and applying them to shipbuilding and other areas for military material where they had not been applied to before.


> On Mar 12, 2015, at 17:02, Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
> 
> On 3/12/2015 11:56 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> but the fact that they were approximately the same year isn't at all.
>> They both needed the stored-program computer and micro-electronics to
>> have been invented, and they both needed the impetus of competition
>> with the USSR - don't forget that DARPA and NASA were both created
> 
> 
> Although 'technology' development has an infinite history along with
> human development, World War I marked a quantum change in the use and
> development of technology as for very large-scale systems and very
> large-scale effects.
> 
> World War II promoted the scale and complexity some number of quantum
> increments.
> 
> The Cold War gave us an identical, continuing impetus for these tech
> efforts, along various lines, including both flight and communications
> (and computation, of course.)
> 
> So I agree that it was very large historical forces that drove these two
> major accomplishments towards their major milestone around the same time.
> 
> Considering how 'important' a milestone is  can be useful.  However
> trying to decide among milestones that each massively changed the world,
> assessing one as more important than another, is probably  a fool's errand.
> 
> Quantum/paradigm levels of change affect whatever is being measured in
> percentage by orders of magnitude.  Judging between them probably
> affects percentages by single digits.
> 
> d/
> -- 
> Dave Crocker
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
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