[s_kilk]

> But that doesn't necessarily and always mean that people couldn't have invented something without military funding and uses in mind.

It's not so much about the Military specifically, but about public funding in general. In short: world-transformative technological innovations tend to come out of public funding, where the license to experiment, sheer volume of funding, and isolation from market pressures enables smart people to build transformative things.

So yes anyone could have invented X, but probably not if they had to operate on the market and without a money-fountain to tap into.