It was the summer of 1959, and the United States needed a Cold War to win. In 1957, the Soviet bloc scored a major technological victory with Sputnik 1. The next year, China’s Communist leadership launched the sweeping, and ultimately devastating, Great Leap Forward. In the spring of 1959 in Cuba, Fidel Castro’s guerrillas forced president Fulgencio Batista into exile. The US needed to recapture the momentum and demonstrate that it was still at the helm of world affairs. The plan: president Dwight D Eisenhower was to unveil the world’s first Chinese computer. The invention of the first Chinese computer…

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