The Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) has aggressively and persistently supported technologies key to the personal computer (PC) revolution. Uncovering this political-economic link provides an important corrective to the popular lore surrounding the origins of the PC....

A Pentagon program to advance semiconductor technology offers some important empirical evidence for the national debate over industrial policy. While not an explicit attempt at promoting international competitiveness, the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) program does contain a whole...