On the face of things -- true. However, the drive from NASA and it's external munufacturers to make things smaller and lighter to fit into the allocated parameters did a great deal to drive the miniaturization and technology that is so well represented in the PC. You think Big Blue would have downsized it's mainframes on their own?
The main drive for Blue in the late 60's / early 70's was computer room floor-space -- so much so that they had empty frames as joiners to convey a dozen cables that could as well be draped beneath the raised floors. Blue went all out to 'kill' Andahl/Fujitsu; Magnusson; ITEL/NatSemi; et al; from placing/keeping their mainframe clones in the shops. I installed a high-end mainframe at a bank in March, and Blue bought it out and sent it to the crushers in September, mainly due to the lowered cost of the [bundled] software licensing on their box compared to others for which the customer had to pay full price.
While I agree with some others that think the eventual outcomes would have been the same [but in the next millenium], I believe that the technology impetus driven by the overall space program is NASA's greatest legacy -- and I resent NASA's management and the godgov throwing it away.
Not quite. It was a combination of NASA and the military that helped push for miniaturizations of electronics. The Apollo had an onboard computer.
We replaced the 'core' (using magnetic 'donuts' from the early 1950's) computers in the orbiters equivalent to the 80-386 in the early 90's.
One of the nice things about "core" is that it is non-volatile. It still works fine as memory, however, it is difficult to make, slow, and bulky.
Personal Computers came from Video Games, such as the 'Pong" game, Atari game machines, and Commodore PET, and the first PC was an Altair, which did not even have a keybord.
The first microprocessor (I4004) was designed for a calculator (the Busicom). Hobbyists are what helped drive the early PC market. A keyboard was quickly made for the Altair (or any S-100 bus computer). I know I have one. Video games were an offshoot and both kind of developed in parallel.
If it were up to NASA we would still use main-frames with dumb terminals.
I don't buy this for a second. Remember the cost of replacing an entire infrastructure. PCs came into their own (70s) when NASA was between Apollo and Shuttle. Money was tight. When I was at JPL, we looked continuously at technology options vs. cost and upgrade viability.
I got my first PC (a Commodore) in 1980. In the late 80's, and early 90's (10 years later) while working at KSC, I tried for years to get a PC to help with my work, and just couldn't even get an authorization for one, so I ended up bringing in my own PC from home.
WOW! I had a Sun Workstation on my desk clear back in the 80s. However, I was at JPL, not KSC.