Silicon Valley would not have existed were it not for war. The DoD was Fairchild’s first main customer for its transistors.https://twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/1009219803448410112 …
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Replying to @Grady_Booch
Does this mean it's a good thing that we had war, or that it's a bad thing that we got Silicon Valley, or is it just the way things are?
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Replying to @Plinz
War is never a good thing. It is bloody and messy and tragic and chaotic. Were it not for the forces of WW II
@bletchleypark would not have been, and thus likely not Turing or Flowers or many others...1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Were it not for WW II ENIAC would be still happened but likely very different and in a different time scale. Were it not for WW II Germany could have been the center of computing innovation, led by Konrad Zuse.
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Were it not for the Cold War transistors and integrated circuits and systems such as GPS would have evolved in very different ways. Good can rise from the horrors of war. But I’d still prefer to live in a world where war was not necessary.
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Replying to @Grady_Booch @bletchleypark
Me, too. But I have a strong suspicion that this world would still be in the stone age. The good thing is that now, wars have become too expensive and therefore less useful. Most modern Silicon Valley innovation was spawned by peaceful incentives, which is inspiring hope.
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Replying to @Plinz @bletchleypark
I agree that most of modern computing is shaped by other than the needs of war. And yet, those same peacefully-formed technologies will always be used in unexpected by governments to wield control over their citizens and as leverage over their foes.
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And we must be vigilant in guarding against that. Additionally, much of modern computing creates a new risk that global corporations may become the next existential threat to individual freedom and privacy.
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I don’t know if we’d still be in the Stone Age but certainly we would not have the same advances in medicine or science or anything. Computing is one of the most interesting of human endeavors for it has lifted up every aspect of the human experience.
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It is hard to say, but the thing that drove the transition from the stone age to the bronze age was a need for better weapons, mostly for intertribal competition. The individual sacrifices that have to be made when you start mining ore in earnest are considerable.
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