Comment by fc417fc802

Probably not. Materials science research is much more dependent on analog electronics, specifically measuring voltage signals, than on digital electronics.

Modern computers are certainly a nice quality of life improvement for researchers though.

That said, commercial production lines might be a different story. Now I'm wondering what the minimum viable computer system would be to implement the firmware for ASMLs machines, for example. Probably more than vacuum tubes but I'm guessing you could pull it off with an old 8 bit chip. That's just a guess though.