[TheOtherHobbes]

PARC is heavily DARPA-funded today. In the 70s, PARC hoovered up a lot of Stanford grads who had been working on government funded projects at SRI. It's unlikely PARC would have been as successful without them.

Bell Labs was independent, but there are similar indirect links - lots of freshly minted PhDs cutting their teeth on government funded research, then moving into industry.

Government seed funding was directly responsible for the Whirlwind and TX series projects, for IBM's SAGE system, for the work of important consultancies like Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, and the various ACs (Illiac, Multivac, etc) all of which laid the foundations of modern computing.

IBM, DEC, and eventually Apple and MS productised that work, but it simply wouldn't have happened without government support.