Word: 1980s
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Automobiles. Last year Detroit bought only about $2 million worth of chips, but by the early 1980s the auto industry is expected to become a more than $1 billion market in its own right. At General Motors, chips are already at work regulating the ignition systems of Olds Tornados. GM President Elliott Estes estimates that by 1988 fully 90% of his company's cars will contain even more elaborate electronically controlled ignition systems. Though a computer in every car is still a couple of years away, both Ford and GM last year signed separate long-term contracts with Motorola...
Perhaps, as Bell Labs' Thomas suggests, &"the most exciting applications will not come until the kids who are still in high school and have grown up with pocket calculators and home computers become the engineers of the 1980s and 1990s." But the miracle chip is here now, and if American business does not quickly take the lead in exploiting its myriad and ever growing capabilities, a potentially enormous market could slip through its fingers...
...years since 1946. Four generations of computer evolution-vacuum tubes, transistors, simple integrated circuits and today's miracle chips-followed one another in rapid succession, and the fifth generation, built out of such esoteric devices as bubble memories and Josephson junctions, will be on the market in the 1980s. In the 1990s, when the sixth generation appears, the compactness and reasoning power of an intelligence built out of silicon will begin to match that of the human brain...
Boeing's plane will face tough competition for some $50 billion in aircraft orders expected in the 1980s. The fuel-efficient, 229-seat Airbus, made by a French-German-Spanish consortium, will be a strong challenger. Neither McDonnell Douglas nor Lockheed has yet announced new high-technology planes. Instead, they will offer modernized versions of the DC-10 and L-1011. Boeing is gambling big that the airlines will prefer an all-new plane that will still be flying, and coming out in up-to-date versions of its own, in the year...
...Russian Research Center, notes that the U.S.S.R. has been increasing production by 6% a year. "It won't take them that long to bring new stuff on line," he predicts. One major U.S. oil company forecasts that Russian output will rise, though at declining rates, into the late 1980s and perhaps even longer...