Originally Posted by Anteater

I'll reiterate: unless it was commercialized, you would have never even had the opportunity to use this tech under any circumstances. Why? Because before this tech was commercialized, it was clunky to the point of being unusable by most people. When Bill Gates was a teenager, there were like two or three universities in the entire country with an actual UI to code with. You can thank companies like IBM and Microsoft for having something usable by a regular citizen, not the government. Prior to them, the idea of anyone even having a personal computer was a fantasy. There was never any drive from the U.S. government or any other country to make technology usable or consumable for regular people: those desires came from people outside of government.