In fact you can thank NASA and most of of the aerospace industry as well - today's composites, your digital camera, and lots of other goodies have been in the works for decades before you saw a sign of them.
What Boeing has done is to skip the "oh dear, it's going to be really hard to be the first.." stage and decide that Rutan and others have done enough ground work to make scaling up into commercial aircraft feasible.
“Rutan and others have done enough ground work to make scaling up into commercial aircraft feasible.”
Personally, I’d like to have a Lancair P-4, one fine personal traveling machine!