I've been wondering something similar, about another piece of computer history. The basics of the Unix operating system were developed by researchers working for AT&T in 1970. The university of Berkeley immediately started working on their own version of Unix, which became BSD (which now underlies the Mac OS X). AT&T immediately sued Berkeley for copyright infringement. Berkeley won the suit. Apparently AT&T research had accepted government money at some point, or used government funded, university based research (from MIT) to get started.
2 questions:
1.) Anyone know where a history of this might be?
2.) It seems like once upon a time any research that received public funds had to remain in the public domain. That no longer seems to be the case, companies seem to commonly patent research that is based on government funded research. When did things change, or has it always been the way it is now?
As to Google, it was developed by two grad students; their original experiment, and even there original database, is still online, you can find it all at this link:
http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm