Like anything else in life?
How much it took for the Guthenberg press to be "successful". It took at least 50 years since Guthenberg died bankrupted until there were millions of books being printed and people realised what the printing was by the consequences.
Guthenberg pushed so hard his entire life.
Aviation was not pushed by fanatics that killed themselves for at least 50 years(they were gliders in India thousands of years ago that killed themselves trying to fly) before it became a normal thing.
Read about Otto Lilienthal or the casualty rate of early aviators and then tell me that it was not pushed.
The nuclear bomb was not pushed with project Manhattan, one of the biggest expenditures on earth ever?
Rockets were not pushed? Going to the moon was not pushed? The diode and the transistor were not pushed by the germans and later the Americans?
Lasers were not pushed before we knew what could be done with them? Computers were not pushed?
>I don't think this was the case with any of the major steps in the development of digital computing but would be quite interested if people can think of historical precedent.
The entire Silicon Valley thing was created by the Pentagon at first. It did not went from zero to billions of devices instantly. The military were paying the development of early (ultra expensive)microprocessors in the dozens to power submarines and spaceships, like the hand weaved RAM of the Apollo devices.
The early entire DARPA internet was at first 56Kbits, the entire network!!
Certainly things like Xerox PARC machines were pushed when every single machine did cost a fortune. It was not pulled because Xerox had no idea of what to do with the technology, just like lasers before.