I dunno if it was clear or not, but it wasn't really industry driving the research: it was the various governments, and, as you say, they were planning things.

I dunno if it was clear or not, but it wasn't really industry driving the research: it was the various governments, and, as you say, they were planning things. Well, sort of. That's not what a real technological plan is: in real life when we try to build advanced things, we identify the lacunae and develop a plan to fix those. Just like Apollo and the Manhattan project. This one was a giant punt into "shyeeet maybe this will work." Sort of like all fusion research to date, except worse, because unlike fusion, the gaps in building a 5th gen computer are not even identifiable. It might as well be "we plan on being lead in the antigravity industry by 2030." Thanks for working on BSD and GCC (and Cyc, which is also pretty damned cool)!