No... not exactly. It's interesting that you pick that one, because Alan Kay talks at length about this subject (poke around YouTube and you can find clips if you're interested). Most of that tech came about because there was a lot of paranoia, a lot of money, and not a lot of good ideas. So they took the money and threw it at universities and research labs, without very many strings attached. Once it started to look like we were winning, all the funding dried up.

I know, right? Can you imagine how bad it would be if the department of defense blew a big wad of cash for a limited period of time on some sort of packet switched communication system that would survive a nuclear war? Geez, we really got lucky there.