Popular myth would have you believe the entrepreneurs and CEOs working in the internet and technology sectors have built up their companies from scratch. This, however, would overlook the enormous role government investment has played in making funds available for the research and development of the products and services these companies offer.
The first computers were developed during the Second World War at Bletchley Park in England to crack the German Enigma codes. The iPhone depends on the internet, the origins of which lie in ARPANET, a program funded in the 1960s by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), part of the U.S. Defense Department and later renamed. The Global Positioning System (GPS) began as a 1970s U.S. military program called NAVSTAR. Even SIRI, the iPhone’s voice-recognizing personal assistant, can trace its lineage to the government: It’s a spin-off of a DARPA artificial-intelligence (AI) project.