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"The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy."

And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances?

The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources.

If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did.

The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)

It could be argued that the huge stack of software simply build on languages created in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, and the hardware movement you mention is the evidence of Moores Law in action. I do not think these are evidence of radical innovation.

Commercial use of GPS wasn't allowed until 1996, and there has been some refinement of use in the last decade. Without GPS, there are no turn by turn directions, and there is no GPS without the space program. There is no GPS without the government funding of military technology, and allowing commercial use.

There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so.

Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now.

I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.

There's a lot of government involvement. There's a stonking amazing overwhelmingly lot of private involvement. There's no Silicon Valley without, you know, Silicon Valley. Not the place, the people, the companies, the innovation. Government has better PR, the people have the vast, vast bulk of the actual time and wealth poured in to these innovations.

Government and PR? I'm taking that with a grain of salt. First, lots of those programs were originally 'secret' so they would not publish information about them. The only PR-sy thing is perhaps some of the outward space-race stuff.

Government can do propaganda (sometimes), but they do not do good PR, IMO.

The argument about computers and computer technology being almost stagnant for the past 40 years is the science behind it.

Look at programming languages. They still borrow from C very heavily. What major advancements have there been during the past 10-20 years? Look at operating systems. The Unix way of thinking and the fundamental concepts still live on, because they work. What advancements have there been to the fundamental ideas and aspects of operating systems? How about compilers? How about computer architecture? CISC to RISC? We still use von Neumann architecture from 50's, surely by now we would have came up with something superior? No. Your iPhone 5 relies on the concepts realized by scientists 50-60 years ago.

The thing is, that most advancements in the field come from technological advancemnts which actually come from our ability to produce better-performing silicon chips. iPhone owes so much to semiconductor industry and other advancements in physical technology which takes advantage of the fundamental CS concepts developed mainly in the 60's and 70's. Computer science itself has been still for ages, and will remain so, unless some new science comes up and revolutionarizes the field. Until then we owe to Gödel, Turing, von Neumann, Dikstra, Knuth, Ritchie and so on. Not to Jobs. Or Gates. Or Torvalds. These people are irrelevant from science point of view.

We need new sciences to fuel technologies which can be put to use. Praise semiconductor industry, chemistry, physics, nanotechnology and so on. But don't ever relate iPhone or whatever else web 2.0-Apple-Social-cult to the science behind computing.

In short, we build upon what was discovered 30-40 years ago, and no new fundamental discoveries are made.

What's the point of having a pissing match between engineers and scientists? You need both to push technology forward.

Science can lead to better engineering, but better engineering can also lead to better science as well. You don't get very far in astronomy unless your engineers can build telescopes. You don't get very far in computational biology without engineers to create microchips, write software, etc.

What was the use of spending all that effort to get to the moon? There wasn't much interesting up there, scientifically. And the ballistics used would have been familiar to Isaac Newton. But it turns out that going to the moon pushed forward a lot of fields, like materials science, aerodynamics, and so forth.

If you have only disdain for practical things, you end up like the ancient Greeks-- smart guys who were unwilling to get their hands dirty by actually doing an experiment or building a device. So, for example, they philosophized about what must be inside the human body, rather than actually looking. They discovered the steam engine but dismissed it as a toy.

If theoretical CS hasn't advanced that much in the last 30 years, maybe it's because there isn't that much left to discover there. And that would be fine. There's more than ever going on in computational biology, material science, chemistry, and so forth. Who knows. Maybe some grubby engineers will come up with a quantum computer, and then theoretical CS people will have something to do again. All we know for sure is that keeping an open mind and a reasonable-sized ego is the best way to approach the problem.

There was a competitive communications infrastructure before the USG decided to nationalize it all and AT&T managed to lobby themselves into a weird government-mandated monopoly position. If AT&T had not been granted a monopoly competitive pressure would have forced something like NANPA to be developed and we probably would have ended up with LNP a bit faster.

On the other hand AT&T’s monopoly provided funding to Bell Labs which had more to do with our modern world than DARPA.

The Internet as we know it today couldn’t exist until the government in the form of the NSF and their government & research only rules were bypassed by commercial interests.

As a 21 year old, I wanted to take offense to the Steve Jobs comment because he was a real jerk and the innovation came from the Woz's and not the Jobs, but given my limited interactions with others in my age group, the vast majority of them are pants on head dumb enough to have a shrine to honor turtlenecks.

Why so much hate? The foundations of Apple were built by Jobs and Woz. Several days ago someone else on HN pointed out that had it not been for Jobs, Woz probably would have been just another nameless, brilliant engineer at HP. Likewise, without Woz, Jobs probably would not have had a computer to sell.

Apple did not invent the graphical user interface or multitouch displays. However, you cannot deny that Jobs was a driving force behind the Lisa/Macintosh and the iPhone. Without those products, the technology innovations that supported them might still be languishing in expensive, niche markets.

You are looking at what you see and don't consider what you don't see. You are seeing how government intervention did these things but you are not considering that without this intervention society would have made other uses of the resources. I realize it's impossible but any analysis has to take into account unseen possibilities when considering government intervention. Ignoring the unseen effects of your actions leaves your analysis incomplete.

I'm not under 30.