Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
You’ve really got to watch the video clip below. Made by MIT in 1965, it shows one of the first computers made for the Apollo space program by Raytheon, an electronics company located in Waltham, MA.
The computer pictured in the video was part of the guidance and navigation system on one of the first Apollo spacecrafts. You will hear the word “miniaturized,” as the film shows the manufacture of “memory modules” that are arranged in racks the size of a small refrigerator.
The film does not make this clear, but what it depicts is the invention and manufacture of a precursor to the cell phone you are holding in your hand on which you will watch this video. Everything you see in this video was paid for by tax dollars and done for the NASA program that four years after this film was made would put three men in a spacecraft and land two of them on the moon.
In a very real sense, our government set out way back then to develop for NASA the technology that we hold in our hands and depend on in our lives every day. Our grandparents and parents paid the taxes that manufactured this computer and enabled the future. The salary of everyone working at Raytheon came through government contracts paid for with tax dollars.
Without the government and taxes that Trump and the Republican Party rail against every day, what you see in this video would have never happened.
The Deep State did this.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
