Please go find a copy of Hackers by Steven Levy at the local library and read it. Yes, all of the core stuff done in the 60s through the 80s that most of us rely upon as the fundamental underpinnings of our craft were developed either at universities as (D)ARPA projects, or by a small handful of corporations like Ma Bell, DEC, Xerox, etc. By the mid to late 80s you could also add some government funded work out of European universities and labs (like this little thing called the world wide web that was created at CERN...)