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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Shustek: Let’s take a short diversion here. The Arpanet that you had worked on eventually becomes the Internet and the World Wide Web and is obviously something that’s changing all of our lives. I think I remember correctly reading that you politically tend toward libertarianism, the idea that small government is best. Yet all of this early networking work with ARPA was funded by the government. Do you think in retrospect that that’s a proper role for government? Should they have done that and if they didn’t would anyone else have done that?

Metcalfe: No, I think they should have. I think one of the few things government should do is finance research. I have learned, from many years, that the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies can’t afford to do research other than monopolies. There’s some famous ones, like the telephone monopoly, [AT&T] Bell Labs; the computer monopoly, [IBM] Watson Labs; the copier monopoly, Xerox PARC. And on it goes. In retrospect, the monopolies aren’t worth it for the research they do. It’s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs is, or was. But other than the transistor, UNIX, and the Princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&T as a monopoly sat on innovation, and IBM after that, and Xerox after that. It’s just not worth it.

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Metcalfe_Robert_1/Metcalfe_Robert_1_2.oral_history.2006.7.102657995.pdf

It’s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs is, or was. But other than the transistor, UNIX, and the Princess telephone, what did we get for all that money?

This is "aside from that, what did the Romans do for us" territory. The transistor, Unix, C, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device, the entire field of information theory. The cosmic microwave background was also discovered there. AT&T's monopoly certainly held back telecom, but Bell Labs was as cool as its reputation.

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