The Command Line: How Cold War Compute, Early AI, and Silicon Valley’s Birth Turned Information Into Power (1956–1969)

From the Dartmouth AI workshop and the invention of the integrated circuit to ARPA, SAGE, and Fairchild Semiconductor, the late 1950s and 1960s quietly birthed the first compute–military–industry complex. This chapter tracks how information itself became a strategic asset — and why the AI boom of 2025–2035 is its direct descendant.