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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

>I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee

The Internet would seem to be an obvious counter-example to this claim.

"The Internet" ? What definition of Internet allows it to be considered a single revolutionary entity that was invented, and by a committee no less.

ARPANET?

AFAIK ARPANET started as a project to implement existing ideas about networking.

It was the first packet-switching network, and thus an invention. It also directly grew into the Internet (the original ARPANET was the first network on the Internet), hence my response. And, it was designed by committee. So as far as my original comment goes, I still think the Internet is a pretty good counter-example to Woz's claim.

Packet-switching was the invention; ARPANET the implementation. Implementations by committees/teams/groups are commonplace. For you to call it a good counter-example, you need to show that packet-switching was invented by a committee.

I don't think separating the two is reasonable. Was the invention of the internal combustion engine separate from its first construction? Was the invention of the atom bomb separate from the construction and testing of The Gadget?

Conception and implementation are, in my mind, both necessary for invention.

You can define things however you want but you're talking about something very different to what Woz is talking about.

True. However, the Internet as we know it today would not exist is committees controlled it. OSI 7 Layer vs TCP/IP Model. W3C Recommendations. There are many [significantly-]ignored committee creations.

The internet was novel, but not revolutionary until the WWW came along. The browser and hypertext brought the revolution of universally-available content.

And every Lennon/McCartney song.

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