Tresy Kilbourne writes:


: You know, the market is not always evil. Think about how that computer on
: your desk came to exist. As recently as the 70s, only big bad
: corporations could afford computers, because the technology was too
: expensive to bring them within the range of the average person's budget.

In the 70s I had a computer on my desk---a Northstar Horizon in a
wooden case---that was not made by a big bad corporation, but rather
a small harmless one that originally wanted to call itself Kentucky
Fried Computers.  It ran CP/M and when I came into a windfall I fixed
it up with a 20meg hard disk (I already had a one-meg 12 inch floppy
drive).  And that machine was supplemented by an Apple //, which was
luggable and not made by a big, bad corporation, whatever Apple may
have become, and then that was replaced by an Osborne, which also was
not made by a big, bad corporation.

Moore's so-called law applied to those micro-computers---the term
Personal Computer hadn't been invented yet.  So computers were getting
cheaper and cheaper then.

: NOONE was even thinking that computers would soon be appliances that most
: people could afford.

I don't think that most people would call a typewriter an appliance,
but in the seventies I was already certain that the computer would
replace the typewriter for other people, just as it had for me.

: What happened, then, in essence, was that the big
: bad corporations who could afford computers subsidized the R&D that drove
: down the price of computers to the point where we could afford them.

It was the people who could afford digital watches and calculaters
that supported the R&D that went into chips like the 8080 and its
clone (with improvements) the Z80.  The Z80 was the CPU in my
Northstar.  IBM, at that time, was trying to sell me some sort of
weird word-processor that only had a three line screen and had no
computing capabilities.  I had a 25 line screen, an 8080 assembler,
Pascal Z, C-Basic, and Microsoft Basic (which I didn't like), WordStar
and a simple database program called, I believe, DataStar.  None of
those programs came from big, bad corporations. (Microsoft may have
been bad back then, but they weren't big.)

And now I have two desktop computers and a laptop, all from Dell,
which is getting to be a big, bad corporation, but certainly never did
any serious R&D.  And my operating system was written by a kid in
Norway named Linus and is free.  And most of my software comes from the
Free Software Foundation, which is not now, and never was, and never will
be, a big bad corporation.  And I use LaTex for producing texts, and
that is a free bunch of macros for TeX which is also free and was written
by a computer scientist and mathematician so that he could typeset his
own books.  And so on.

: This
: is the way it's supposed to work: From each according to his abilities,
: etc. Sure, the gov't kickstarted the whole process, but I don't see how
: it could have been otherwise (yes, it would have been vastly preferable
: if it had been the Peace Corps, not the Pentagon). If the gov't had
: stayed in throughout, I think the likelihood is high that, as in other
: areas, taxpayers would have continued subsidizing the big bad
: corporations, rather than the reverse, which is how it basically turned
: out.

The government did not kickstart the computers on my desks.  (It did
fund much of the initial research that led to the Internet, but that
R&D was done by academic researchers in universities: corporations,
bad or not, had nothing to do with it.)

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
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