I see this comment often and it strikes me as conspiracy nonsense. For example, AMD was founded within a year of Intel - years before either manufactured a CPU

I see this comment often and it strikes me as conspiracy nonsense. For example, AMD was founded within a year of Intel - years before either manufactured a CPU. You're blurring lines with antitrust lawsuits in the 90s. Now if you want to talk about the Federal government single handedly propping up the market for semiconductors until the end of the Apollo program, that's a different story and includes more players than DARPA.