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by wongarsu 2857 days ago
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)