Please don't vote for Mitt Romney.

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Justify that outlandish claim in very concrete and specific terms. No generalities now!

ruveyn

Me.

You have made an arbitrary assertion which you have failed to back up with reference to facts.

You are a silly person.

ruveyn

Some of us would. Computers existed for decades before they became profitable to private corporations.

I lived through the era of big government funded computers.

The kind that made a different were computers that ordinary people could afford.

Brought to you by Capitalists --- Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and many other like free spirits of the Silicone Valley tribe.

ruveyun

Funded by the government, further developed by academics and hobbyists, developed right up to the point of profitability by Xerox engineers who never ended up profiting from it, and finally packaged and sold by Jobs and Gates. All they did was slap a fancy ribbon on it and sell it for a huge profit. 99% of the road to the computer revolution had already been built before profit became a motive.

Not really. There was no guarantee that the Apple line would succeed, for example. Jobs and Wozniack just as easily could have lost. The Transistor was invented at Bell labs and not at a government funded project.

The only thing the government did was the first generation of Internet, the DARPA network. All the other stuff was done by industry or the universities.

And no, Al Gore did not invent the internet.

The first all electronic computer ever invented was by Atanassof in 1938 at the University of Indiana I think. It was a private project and he built his first crude all electronic computer with second hand components on his own time. Not one single government buck went into it.

In 1939 Konrad Zeuss invented a similar computer in Germany independently. Again, it was not a government project and it was done on Zeuss' initiative.

Government funding came on line later on.

The first computers that small businesses and individuals could afford were build by DEC and a few other companies. A well off individual could afford to buy his own PDP-8, for example. The maxicomputers built by IBM could only be purchased by large well heeled business and government.

The desk top computers were the result of entreprenuers who had no guaranteed of success. Their line of development was a end-run around the big machines.

ruveyn

Ada Lovelace, her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this she is sometimes considered the "World's First Computer Programmer" around 1845.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

While there was no continuity between the ancient world, and the modern in regard to computers, but perhaps the oldest known computer - a calculator - was discovered in a sunken Greek ship wreck in the eastern Mediterranean from the Roman era.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The so called Antikithera Machine. It was a mechanical device and rather cleverly contrived. Nothing like that was produced again until the time of Pascal. He invented a mechanical adding machine that could do carrying.

ruveyn

Ada was the brilliant protoge of Charles Babbage. She wrote programs for a machine that was never built. Babbage kept fiddling the specification for his "analytic engine" so often it never got built and the British Government cut off his funding. He did build a rump version of his "difference engine" which was not a general purpose machine like his "analytic engine"

So Ada programmed for a machine that never was, but if it had been, her program would have worked.

ruveyn

Thank you; I couldn't recall it's name.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I think that is rather sad. The world would have been very different.

There's actually a book about that very world, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Stirling. It's pretty entertaining and some of the ideas would probably work, plus it's often considered the origin of Steampunk.