this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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i agree with your point, but i still wonder why all of the IT was invented in america. very little software was written outside of it (at least in the early years)
That's easy, brain drain. When programming was coming into existence, the US was in the cold war - Russia did have a lot of IT stuff too early on, it just wasn't publicly facing
And during this period, the US was spending infinite money investing because we had an ungodly strong economy - Europe, China , and Japan were doing reconstruction from the war and paying back loans, the global South was being economically colonized... The US and Russia were the only players with the funds to advance tech at the time
But if you fast forward a couple decades, every developed nation was doing things in the computing space. But the US had a huge lead on chip manufacturing, manufacturers were signing deals with Microsoft, and everything just kind of converged around the base architecture.
But even then, arm was invented in the UK, Linux came from Sweden (?), things were happening all over
So long story short, the US was in a position to invest while no one else was. That gave us a huge head start, one which, combined with a loosening of anti monopoly enforcement over the same period, created huge barriers of entry around certain parts of the stack
i don't know whether this fully explains it. germany, even after 1960, never really invested much into IT. we have one company here, infineon, which produces processors, but afaik they're microprocessors for automobile, not PC-material. we do have strong open source software development here in germany though. (KDE, ...)
I think it does fully explain it. Germany has never made CPUs, but they have definitely been there on the software scene though
Germany has long been a powerhouse on software. It trends towards mission critical stuff rather than anything consumer facing, but it's been very much around for many decades now
ok good to know. you seem to be better informed than i am here