[simiones]

The problem with your comparison is that IT took tens of years of investment before it produced anything truly useful. It is very hard to imagine that research being funded for years and years without financial return by anything other than a state-level actor. And in most capitalist democracies, especially in the US, the only politically-viable way for the state to massively invest in an endeavor is to do so through military spending, which is what happened with IT.

[wongarsu]

I'm not so sure. Mechanical calculators were profitable, and one those were good enough the jump to the first programmable computer [1] was fairly small and would have happened even without Nazi funding. That computer was used for German aviation research, so it's likely it would have been bought by other research institutes. From there you have a fairly straight forward path of incremental improvements that open up new markets, until we arrive where we are now.

But I will agree that the transition to silicon would have taken another decade without the space race.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)