[ih] ARPANET and Apollo 11

[Bill Ricker]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 11:10 PM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
> From what I understood about WWII, it was mainly taking methods already in use in other industries and applying them to shipbuilding and other areas for military material where they had not been applied to before.

 We always stand on the shoulders of those who came before, be they
giants or just many generations. Time-and-motion studies and the
industrial revolution fed into WW2, but the military application gave
its name to "Operations Research".

Brian's claim up-thread was that the rockets and
stored-program-computer antecedents of Apollo and DARPAnet came from
WW2 and Cold War, and were both gated by the semiconductor IC
revolution. While Goddard and von Braun had experimented in prior
decades (contemporary with your Sears, Ford, ...), the war did indeed
provide  the first practical liquid fuel rocket (V2), and classified
war efforts (Havard, Bletchley) prepared the stage the first stored
program computer (whether Manchester or Cambridge) in the Cold War.
Explosive progress in both were indeed held back until transistors and
LSI ICs came on-line. Hence the convergence in 1969.  I find Brian's
explication of 1969 compelling.



-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux