I learned programming on an Indian Altair/IMSAI 8080 clone that used the S100 bus in 1978 - the ECIL Micro-78. One memorable weekend was spent trying to debug an obscure bug which turned out to be single memory location failure in a 16 KByte DRAM board that used Intel 4k DRAMs for the first time. DRAMs had a well-earned reputation for unreliability at that time, but had ~4x the density of SRAM from the same era, so they were more economical. In 1982, I started programming in C for the first time on a Cromemco Z80 box at college, and that one was as bulletproof as it got for a dual 8" floppy box of that era.
The importance of a plug-in bus like the S100 was a crucial insight that enabled the PC revolution, and the first wave of the microcomputer revolution happened mainly due to bus compatibility. Eventually, Apple and IBM also used plug-in buses which were essentially simplified or smaller versions of the S100, using signals from the 6502 and 8088 instead.
The 16-bit extension of the IBM PC plug-in bus became known as ISA, and ensured its enduring domination even to this day (it's still around as the X-bus inside modern highly-integrated Southbridge ASICs, though it's no longer brought out as an external plug-in bus, except in some legacy industrial PCs).
The importance of Heavy Water for the Nazi weapons-development program is overstated. They could simply have used graphite (carbon) as a moderator, as the early Manhattan project breeder reactors did. However, they had made a measurement error on the neutron-absorption cross-section of Carbon, showing it as too high for use as an efficient moderator, hence they went on a wild-goose chase to separate Heavy Water by electrolysis, for use as a moderator using the Norsk Hydro plants at Norway, which were eventually destroyed by Allied sabotage and bombing. All this rigmarole was therefore due to a small laboratory-methods error by some little-known German scientist (probably contamination of his carbon samples with a trace element like Boron or Cadmium). Graphite was readily available in Axis territory - a few more tests would likely have found a purer source without Boron contamination.
Of course Nazi Germany didn't know that. Destroying their wild goose chase is ironically still helpful in getting them to divert more resources replacing it.
The importance of a plug-in bus like the S100 was a crucial insight that enabled the PC revolution, and the first wave of the microcomputer revolution happened mainly due to bus compatibility. Eventually, Apple and IBM also used plug-in buses which were essentially simplified or smaller versions of the S100, using signals from the 6502 and 8088 instead.
The 16-bit extension of the IBM PC plug-in bus became known as ISA, and ensured its enduring domination even to this day (it's still around as the X-bus inside modern highly-integrated Southbridge ASICs, though it's no longer brought out as an external plug-in bus, except in some legacy industrial PCs).