10 World-Changing Inventions from Government Funding
The handy navigating device in nearly every car and Smartphone was also originally developed by the Defense Department in the 1970s to follow the exact locations of nuclear missiles and calculate their proper trajectories. Funding for the system was
The handy navigating device in nearly every car and Smartphone was also originally developed by the Defense Department in the 1970s to follow the exact locations of nuclear missiles and calculate their proper trajectories. Funding for the system was constantly questioned, however, given how expensive GPS satellites are to build and launch. Today, many GPS satellites are aging and the system is in desperate need of an upgrade, according to the Government Accountability Office. Doing so could cost the Air Force $5.5 billion.
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Yes, you can again thank the DOD for being able to read this article right now (and, you know, anything else the Internet lets you do). In the 1960s, the military wanted to develop a communications system that was less vulnerable to attack than telep
Yes, you can again thank the DOD for being able to read this article right now (and, you know, anything else the Internet lets you do). In the 1960s, the military wanted to develop a communications system that was less vulnerable to attack than telephone operators’ rooms and began working on directly linking computers. The first network was called the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) – which was the basis for the modern Internet as we know it.
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Another technological game-changer came from funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In the early days of the Internet, the NSF funded the Digital Library Initiative to index and sort through the growing number of websites. Then Stanford gr
Another technological game-changer came from funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In the early days of the Internet, the NSF funded the Digital Library Initiative to index and sort through the growing number of websites. Then Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin (who was supported by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship) created the algorithm that ranked web pages by importance, and by 1998, they founded Google, Inc. Don’t believe us? Google it.
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The easy-to-use touch screen on your iPhone or iPad might not have been possible without funding from the NSF and the CIA to researchers at the University of Delaware in 1996. The researchers developed a sophisticated finger tracking and gesture reco
The easy-to-use touch screen on your iPhone or iPad might not have been possible without funding from the NSF and the CIA to researchers at the University of Delaware in 1996. The researchers developed a sophisticated finger tracking and gesture recognition system and introduced the first touch-screen tablet called the iGesture Numpad in 2001. Apple purchased the technology in 2005 and tweaked it to develop the iPhone screen.
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