Free is an interesting word to mean, "sold for money". Also while the US government funded part of the initial internet, both of your examples are private citizens creating something you wish we later restricted. GPU's are graphics processors too, it was too late any when they became useful a sort of general purpose workload chip.

We actually could give every teen a 5090 for free right now, no blocking trade agreements required.

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hparadiz a day ago | parent [-]

When I was a kid my school had a computer lab worth 200k in 1995 dollars. This was something very few kids had outside of the United States. None of them were locked down and we were encouraged to learn how to program them. Now we just throw some locked down $200 Chrome books at them and think that's gonna produce the next generation of tech innovation. In any case I wasn't talking about free as in commie.

	▲	enoint 20 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In 1995 you didn’t have: raspberry anything, flipper zero, qemu, commodity smartphones, mail-order circuit board fab—-and that’s just the stuff under $200.
	▲	thereader12 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think I missed what this annecdote means. Lots of countries had computers in 1995. I also don't understand what you mean by "not free as in commie". Do you mean soft power, we already get that, do you mean something other than resources (what money ultimately is)?