<The Minuteman missle computers were not the cutting edge and not very <secret. After all, they did end up on the surplus market without requiring <demil In 1971 is was nothing new but it's design was in the early 60s where is was state of the art. The fact that it declassified and sold as junk ten years later shows how fast things moved in that ten year span. As we moved forward in ten year spans we see different amount of technolical hops. Comparing the MMC to the PDP-8I shows that. The -8 was easily 1/4 the size and power and easily 10x faster. As to the use of computes for nav, that's likely the oldest use. The use I refer to was the targeting and tracking computer which relied on the navigation. Allison