Out of At&T Bell Labs AT&T was a regulated monopoly for a long time.
The point is not that government is better at innovating than private organizations it's that they are better suited for actual research in things that doesn't have a market yet.
Private companies on the other hand are much better at taking knowledge which can be applied to the market to then run with it. But up until that point I think it's fair to say that we would want to sponsor research into basic science for the good of the whole society.
Most major discoveries are accidents, it's those accidents which leads to market application.
Instead history shows us that you can't find something by looking for it. I.e. the most important research we have done haven't had a market to begin with but rather have let the pursue of knowledge be the primary motivator.
Government regulation of Bell Labs as a monopoly strongly incentivized them to invest heavily in research, and basically forced them to sell the results to competitors.
This was not the result of free market competition.
No, it's not completely opposite. You can see UNIX as a simplification of Multics (with the name being a very nice pun!), dropping most of the really hard-to-implement features and focusing on a simple core. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were programmers on Multics and they admitted lifting features from Multics to implement UNIX.
Many of the things that Multics had eventually made their way back into various UNIX derivatives, because they were great features that a modern OS wants to have. Multics was way ahead of its time in many ways.
> Many of the things that Multics had eventually made their way back into various UNIX derivatives, because they were great features that a modern OS wants to have.
