In 1962, the U.S. government bought essentially every integrated circuit produced in America. By 1972, less than half. The handoff from federal procurement to commercial demand — and the price collapse the government's purchasing discipline made possible — invented Silicon Valley.
Of integrated circuits produced in the United States, the federal government bought essentially all of it. No commercial market existed at any price a chip company could economically produce it for.
Apollo + Minuteman dominate. Apollo alone consumes ~60% of the year's IC output. Single largest buyer in the world: the Minuteman II program.
Calculators, mainframe peripherals, the first wave of digital instruments — buying chips at prices the military programs had brought into existence.
By ordering by the hundred thousand and demanding NASA-grade reliability, the federal government drove yields up and unit costs down a learning curve no commercial market could have funded. By 1968, a Micrologic gate that cost $120 in 1961 sold for about a dollar.
The federal government, in the years between Sputnik and the first lunar landing, paid for an industry that no commercial market would have supported. It paid premium prices for parts that did not yet exist at scale. It paid the engineering cost of qualifying a new manufacturing technology against the most punishing reliability standards anyone had ever written. And then, having paid that cost, it stepped back and let the surplus capacity find commercial customers. That handoff did not happen by itself.