PATHS TO DIGITAL MODERNITY 359
dustrial facilities since the 1950s still continued to dominate the market
until the early 1970s. However, there were a limited number of scenarios
in which they could be used. The resulting misjudgments about the fu-
ture development of this technology in the upper executive levels at the
computing giant IBM, for example, are well known. IBM had mistakenly
believed that only a small number of mainframes had any real chance on
the market at fi rst, but this was not surprising because, at this point in
time, new information technologies, just like the early stages of the In-
ternet in the early 1970s, were still fi rmly embedded in the constellations
of the military rivalry and arms race between East and West. The excep-
tion to this proved to be the tradition of using technology to optimize
computational processes in mathematics and the natural sciences or to
collate mass statistical data.^29 It is therefore all the more surprising that
the computer and other technological innovations using microprocessors
were able to break out of the sphere of secret government programs and
military facilities with such force that they were able to spread to all cor-
ners of society just a short time later.
The industrial production and mass import of microprocessors, with-
out which the triumph of the PC within society would have been unthink-
able, began in West Germany at the beginning of the 1970s. It was linked
to the successive miniaturization of processing and storage units, which
was primarily made possible through advancements in the semiconduc-
tor industry and the dropping prices for parts.
Initially, electronic data processing was mostly done in centralized
computing facilities, but a stronger push toward decentralization set in
during the 1970s. This trend had already begun in West Germany with the
transition from punched cards to data entry using visual display units.^30
Although integrated circuits had been around in the West since 1960,
they were hardly used, or rather used only in military aerospace research,
because of their incredibly high production costs.^31 By the end of the
1970s, microchips had become more reliable, and the energy required
for chip production sank enormously. The only thing that still stood in
the way of the rapid spread of this technology was its still-high price. The
standardization of hardware was primarily responsible for making the
production of microprocessors on a large scale possible and cheaper in
the United States and Western Europe.^32 The development tempo of the
computer industry accelerated to such a rate at the end of the 1960s that
it no longer seemed unreasonable to speak of a revolution, although the
term tended to be used in an infl ationary way. In the GDR, on the other
hand, microelectronics—and the potential for rationalization associated
with this technology—did not become a core focus within the scientifi c
technical revolution until the end of the 1970s.^33