Impact of aerospace on computers

Electronics and computers have long been associated with aviation, defense and aerospace. Many aerospace advances would have been impossible without digital computers, and digital computers would not have progressed as rapidly without aerospace. In some sense you may thank aerospace for the computer on your desk and Internet in your life. DoD and NASA programs drove computer technology for the first 25 years, but in the 80s the primary thrust transitioned to the commercial sector. Aerospace computation requirements have driven the development of many electronic components such as transistors, ICs and memory technology. Advances in memory technology progressed from delay lines to electrostatic tubes to magnetic cores and now solid-state memory. As the need for number crunching grew, computers transitioned from batch processing, time-sharing, real-time computing, networking to the ubiquitous PC and Internet. How far is it from your hand-held PDA to the nano computer?