We can look at it that way, yeah. (I think Apollo's salient as the most spectacular example of the really large-scale planned development that was new to the mi

We can look at it that way, yeah. (I think Apollo's salient as the most spectacular example of the really large-scale planned development that was new to the mid-20th C., rather than a variation on the theme of rocketry.) On the other hand, going from the Apple ][ or even the PDP-1 to the IBM PC is not much like going from batteries, gaslights, fueled engines, and compressed air to an electricity utility. Not to argue about words, but that feels like more of a new thing to me. I'll bet it looked like a gamble at the time. Backing off from semantics, maybe we could quantify what we're looking for as something like the productivity growth rate in the world's then-current most-advanced economy? (This would try to rule out cases like postwar recovery as "not the leading economy".)