FREE HISTORY OF COMPUTING COMPANIES LESSON
1969 — Fund a network nobody can own
ARPA, SRI, universities, and Xerox PARC
Fund a network nobody can own
ARPANET coordinated geographically separate research through interoperable packet networks; SRI and universities operated early nodes. Xerox PARC later assembled the Alto, Ethernet, graphical interaction, and laser printing into a vision of personal distributed computing. Public funding and corporate research created shared technical possibilities, while standards, ownership, manufacturing, and distribution determined how those possibilities escaped the laboratory.
Breakthroughs diffuse when funding, research, interoperable interfaces, manufacturing, and commercialization form a connected institutional graph.
Institutional reconstruction
Draw an institution-to-artifact graph for ARPA, SRI, universities, Xerox, and later computer firms. Label who funded, invented, standardized, manufactured, and captured value. Remove one edge and predict what stops diffusing.
Trace the scarce resource, coordination mechanism, power boundary, and newly possible failure.