Many people believe that the rapid increase in the capability of computers was largely due to the demands of the American Space Program. It is indeed true that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) did pressure the computer industry for more speed and more memory in its ground based systems, but the computers in the Apollo spacecraft that traveled to the Moon and those flying in the later space shuttles are relics of a by-gone era. This conservative attitude is the result of NASA's unwillingness to risk human lives: old technologies have a known track record while there is implicit risk in an untested technology. However, even the unpiloted spacecraft use mostly obsolete computers, though NASA has allowed chances to be taken with their memory technologies. Nevertheless, NASA has been a good customer of the computing industry, demanding new techniques even while using...