“And btw Clayton, the US government didn’t create the microprocessor, the first microprocessor was the Intel 4004, which was contracted to a private customer for use in a calculator. Yes the government was a significant customer for a lot of logic products along the way, but no, they didn’t single-handedly cause any of it.”
Starting about 1960, National Security Agency demands for dramatically faster mainframes for cryptanalysis drove substantial improvements in performance. NSA wanted 1000x increases in speed, and pushed on makers such as Texas Instruments to help them with making that possible. There are a number of defense and space projects during this period that also pushed the outside of the envelope in the area of electronics: Atlas; the Polaris program; manned space flight. Now, of course, the electronics in them is pretty amusingly backward. It wasn’t then.
“The Boeing 747 was an outgrowth of the C5a program. Do you really believe that we wouldn’t have wide body jets now if the C5a program didn’t exist? At best, you can argue that they accelerated the technology by a few years; it’s risible to suggest that it wouldn’t otherwise have happened.”
The development of any new technology involves both enormous capital investment and a perceived demand for the product. Teflon, for example, largely comes out the Manhattan Project’s need for materials that would allow the gaseous diffusion concentration of U-235. Could Boeing have built the 747 with the C5A program? Sure. Would they have done so? Maybe, eventually. More importantly: do you think, without World War II, that we would have aircraft technologies like today?
Government subsidies and encouragement aren’t always a good thing. The enormous land grants given to railroads to expand westward dramatically improved economic efficiency…but you wonder if the pressure on the Plains Indians would have been as dramatic and sudden without the expansion westward that the railroads made so possible.
