Most of those things were invented by a company granted a government monopoly on communications and not allowed to directly profit off of any of those advances.

AT&T threw money at smart people and said, "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it"

No one does that anymore.

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WorldMaker a day ago | parent [-]

The big one on the list that wasn't AT&T was microwaves and that was a contractor to Nasa [0] in the heat of the moon race and a similar "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it" mandate.

[0] Defense contractor Raytheon most specifically.

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bena a day ago | parent [-]

I think that's one thing people truly forget when they ask "Why can't we do things like this anymore?"

AT&T paid people to fuck around. Claude Shannon, father of Information Theory, founder of Artificial Intelligence, and namesake to Anthropic's flagship product, was also busy building flame-throwing trumpets and rocket frisbees while creating entire new fields.

	▲	harvey9 a day ago \| parent [-]
		So why can't I order a rocket frisbee today? Wtf America.