Microcomputers As A Space Spinoff 3835

This has been discussed here before.

While NASA certainly bought a decent number of early IC's, it was ICBM R&D that was really driving electronics to be smaller, lighter, and less power hungry. NASA just took advantage of the IC's which were made available due to DOD pushing the state of the art in electronics.

Here's a reference:

From the above:

The first integrated circuits were created in the late 1950s in response to a demand from the military for miniaturized electronics to be used in missile control systems.

Here's another reference:

From the above:

Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962.

Of course, NASA was also also a big customer of IC's in the early 60's, which did help to increase demand and produced an incentive to work on decreasing production costs. But even without NASA, the US missile program would have kept pressure on manufacturers of IC's, it just may not have happened quite as quickly as it actually did.

Later, TI went on to use IC's in "hand held" calculators, which have far broader applications than missile systems and spacecraft.

Eventually, the "personal computer" drove development of faster and cheaper microprocessors and buttociated components, so it's arguable that once IC's were made available, commercial applications drove development just as hard, or even harder, than anything that DOD or NASA could have done.

Jeff -- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)