The Real Story Behind NASA Spinoffs

How NASA helped invent Silicon Valley, CNET

“Several companies in what would become Silicon Valley benefited from the ambitious goals and budget largesse of the Apollo space program,” said Dag Spicer, the senior curator of the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif. “The stringent quality and performance requirements of (integrated circuits) for Apollo allowed early semiconductor companies to learn at government (that is, public) expense, a technology that would soon have broad application and whose price would plummet as these companies perfected manufacturing methods.”