Friends:

          I have been a passive member of SIGCIS for many years now, even though I am no longer an active researcher in the field.  Still, I follow your correspondence with great interest.  I am writing now because I have received an inquiry from a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who is interested in NASA’s historical contributions to computer development.  I know from research on my book Strategic Computing: DARPA and  the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993 (2002) that NASA was involved in the Federal High Performance Computing Program in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I do not, however, know of other significant contributions by NASA to computer development.  If anyone knows of such contributions, I would be happy to know about them.

Thanks,  Alex Roland