Word: chips
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Office Equipment. Before the miracle chip, companies that wanted a computer had to choose between either huge and highly expensive main frame units or smaller, less powerful - but still costly - minicomputers. By radi cally lowering the cost of the traditional minicomputer, miracle chips have dramatically expanded the business market for the minis; their sales are growing at a remarkable 40% annually. At the same time, the chip-equipped minis are proving to be an economical way to get more value for the money out of an existing main frame. They store information and process it lo cally, keeping it handy...
Though they are still several years behind the U.S. in miracle-chip technology, Japanese computer makers are rapidly catching up, in part with the help of government subsidies. For now, Japanese computer imports are less than 1 % of the total U.S. market, but they have multiplied eightfold since 1974 and, according to studies by Quantum Science Corp., a marketing research house, could have a significant impact on IBM itself with in the next five years. Japanese manufacturers have also shown imagination in designing chip-controlled appliances; all the home video recorders sold in the U.S. are made in Japan...
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...
Some people still call it Santa Clara County, Calif., but more and more it is referred to as Silicon Valley, the place the miracle-chip industry calls home. Packed into a 10-mile by 25-mile wedge along the southwestern shore of San Francisco Bay are hundreds of the nation's high-technology firms, many of them involved in manufacturing silicon chips, related semiconductor devices and microcomputer-controlled products. At rush hour, cars inch along Highway 101, the valley's main drag, and peel off into the parking lots of well-manicured, one-and two-story buildings with...
...snatch away their competitors' best engineers and designers. Says President Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices: "All a guy has to do here if he wants to change jobs is drive down the same street in the morning and turn in a different driveway." As billion-dollar chip makers like Texas Instruments and Motorola, which are based elsewhere, throw more of their weight into the fray, the smaller companies of the valley may ultimately be forced either to merge or sell out to larger firms. That could endanger the vitality of the valley. Explains Sanders: "This industry has amoeba...