In the early 1960s when computers were typically the size of a car, the USAF took on the seemingly impossible task of cramming one into a missile. That missile was the Minuteman was an entirely new concept: a small solid fuelled rocket able to independently steer itself to the target. The resulting D-17b computer was so small for the time, I argue it may have been the first desktop computer.

The debt imposed on us all by nuclear weapons will never be paid off in full. But Minuteman became Minotaur, Polaris gave us GPS and Titan became Gemini. The guidance computers for all of these systems went on to evolve into the modern PC.

The creator also made a simulator of the computer which he says “isn’t very good”: https://github.com/lambdaBoost/d-17b_simulator