🚀 go-pugleaf

Shawn C. Masters (smasters@bzy.gmu.edu) wrote:
: Christian Smith (csmith@gmu.edu) wrote:

::The same way we define the Aeronautics Industry in such a way as to say:

::The first man-powered flight, by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C.,
::was arguably the first historical step in the development of the US Space
::Program in which public policy and private enterprise have played parallel
::roles.

: 	Actually, that's not a very good comparison.  The Wrights had a lot
: of trouble getting government involvment before and after their first
: flights.  The government was more interested in Langley's efforts, and then 
: didn't really do much outside of the army until the formation of NACA.

It is an especially bad comparison since the Wright brothers were not
the first man-pwoered flight.  Indeed, they were not even the first
machine powered flight.  That honor goes to a couple of Aussies, but do
to national pride, and some funding issue, the Smithsonian has been
telling it the "traditional" way for 80 years.

:       Eniac was a government driven development.  Very different.  It also
: had next to no communication capabilities.  The question really is where did
: the internet start in history.  Semaphore networks, or arpanet.  I don't
: know, but I would say Eniac had little to do with it outside of military
: interest in computing, and that can be traced back even further then Eniac
: by looking at the computation of tables for use by commanders.

I don't know Shawn, I think we can trace the Internet all the way back
to the original telegraph.  Think about it, it has all the criteria:

     Created by a bunch of geeks interested in morse code
     It spanned the country
     It had a protocol
     It involved data that was mostly for human consumption
     It had the first real "news" feed
     It was of both military and civilian use


What do ya' think?

-cliff