[rubberstamp]

Also those big projects might not have made billions for those who invented it, but it did enable many others make billions standing on shoulder of those giants. They created trillion dollar computing and associated software market.

[graycat]

Yes, the Bell Labs transistors gave us cheap digital computing, and the Bell Labs work on solid state lasers to light optical fibers gave us cheap data communications of the Internet. I'm still not fully clear on what gave us the much higher disk recording densities, but IBM's giant magneto-resistive disk heads may be all or nearly all of it.

But, now, with cheap, powerful digital hardware, lots of powerful software, from BIOS booting to operating systems, relational database and much more, e.g., mobile, the cloud, maybe IOT, there should be some really good opportunities for solid, low risk, high value projects from small teams, even solo, sole founder-developers.