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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a terrible old Cold War era joke:

Russian worker sees a queue to buy sewing machines at the local GUM (department store) and joins it. Eventually he gets to the front, and the sales clerk has run out of the machines, but offers to take down his name for when more come in. After he takes his name, he asks for his address and workplace.

When the man gives his workplace, the sales clerk stops him. "You work at the sewing machine factory. Why are you here? Just smuggle out parts and make your own at home."

The man shrugs. "I tried that, but each time I end up with a submachinegun."

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Similar to another communist joke from ex Yugoslavia:

A worker is waiting in a huge line at 4am to buy cooking oil. Discouraged by how long the line is, he whispers to the guy ahead, "Hey, I heard the general store got a shipment of detergent!" People overhear this and everybody scrambles to the general store, leaving him at the head of the line.

He thinks, "wait, what if the general store did get detergent?" and heads over himself.

Here's a similar joke I found in Viktor Suvorov's faschinating Kuzkina Mat [1] :

A man is walking down the street carrying a 12-roll pack of toilet paper. People surround him, all excited: "Where'd you get that?" The man answers, "I just got it back from the dry cleaner's!"

[1] http://www.andrewnurnberg.com/books/kuzkina-mat/

Actually, this joke is more about Soviet economy fixation on (covert in this case) military production instead of producing sufficient amount of so much awaited home appliances.

And this joke actually is interlinked to the main story.

Namely many of Soviet PC projects were motivated by the late requirement for the military factories to also produce a civil product.

Of course in the end all of it ended in the doom as these factories were not prepare to compete in high competitive open market environment and the market was flooded by cheap Taiwanese PC clones.

Sometimes it turns out ok. Wasn't the Internet built for US military at first.

We could thank nuclear arms for the Internet. I am wondering how much of the current state of Internet holds to the initial promise.

While the Internet as we know it was derived by Darpa, I'm not convinced we wouldn't have one without it. Large scale networks already existed. INTERconnected NETworks don't forget. I had access to Janet, FidoNet & Compuserve prior to the current network.

ARPANet funding started in 1967 or 1968 and brought up the first links in 1969, CompuServe in 1969, FidoNet started in 1982, JANET in 1983, so I don't think you had access to Janet, FidoNet, and CompuServe prior to the ARPANet, or even prior to TCP/IP in 1978 or so.

Some kind of network was going to happen — but remember that Telenet, Tymnet, and PC-Pursuit (aside from CompuServe, The Source, Minitel, and of course the PSTN itself) were already generally available in the 1980s. The issue is that the existing networks were either too tightly controlled and inflexible (Minitel, CompuServe, the PSTN) or too slow (FidoNet) to support a lot of the applications to which we put the internet today.

I'm from the UK. I had access to Janet in 1989 at Uni, and then Compuserve and then FidoNet. Internet access here was about 1994. I personally had it when Windows 95 arrived and I bought the Plus Pack which included Internet Explorer and dial-up software.

Though I must admit, I had an Internet email address I collected via FidoNet using Bluewave.

DARPA barely counts as military.

Yes but the main motivation was to have a network that would sustain nuclear strike.

That's supposedly an urban myth...

From Wikipedia:

In A Brief History of the Internet, the Internet Society denies that ARPANET was designed to survive a nuclear attack:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET; only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.

Bullshit, DARPA/ARPA is as much military as a freaking nuclear warhead. In his speach introducing ARPA, Eisenhower made it extremely clear that its purpose was to cary out research that maintained technological superiority over enemies of the United States ("enemies" is his word). The "Defence" part was only added later for political reasons.

You don't even have to try hard to see the evidence: DARPA is unique among ALL OTHER government agencies because it is military backed and at the cutting edge of defense research.

DARPA has at most 300 employees overlooking a budget of $3 billion (an order of magnitude more "revenue" per employee than Apple) because 90+% of employees are project managers who have a maximum term limit of four years. The only DARPA employee that I know of that worked for the agency twice did so 25 years after his first term. Each of these managers oversees one or more projects worth anywhere between $1 million and $25 million and are advised by an individual scientific board (whose members can stay longer than four years to maintain some continuity).

Dnot get me wrong, I am a firm believer that DARPA is one of the greatest examples of what humans can achieve when they are given the ability to create, rebel, and dream beyond the current capabilities of engineering, but let's not kid ourselves. DARPA primary purpose has always been death and destruction. (Case in point: DARPA's currently most funded project is a scram jet based nuclear warhead that can hit any spot in the world within an hour of launching from the continental United States)

We're just lucky that cooperation is so much more profitable than mutually assured destruction.

In a normal country, yes. In a state capitalism (aka communism as we got to know it) it is either used for military/state applications or is completely discarded.

At least any DARPA/NASA/etc projects had a chance in the private sector...

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