The creation of a new infrastructure often opens up unforeseen ways to make other actions simpler or more rewarding. For example, the Internet was first made possible because of the infrastructure commissioned by the U.S. government during the cold war. Next, enabling technologies such as dial-up modems, followed by high-speed Internet connections, provided access to the web. Finally, HTML, web browsers, and search engines—the application layer—made browsing possible on the World Wide Web. At each successive stage, previous enabling technologies allowed new behaviors and businesses to
...more
