Word: microchip
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...area's problems first surfaced four years ago, when noxious gases from burning chemicals at a series of industrial fires felled both fire fighters and bystanders. There were also reports of workers who suffered adverse reactions to chemicals at microchip firms. One 19-year-old, hired to work around storage tanks at a semiconductor company, began vomiting uncontrollably after less than a week...
...cares, really, if the manual typewriter goes the way of the manual orange-juice squeezer or the crank phone? Progress is progress. It isn't as if the invention itself is dropping from existence; there are new electronic microchip jobs that automatically produce a thousand individually addressed love letters while the author snorkels in Cancún. Nor is there a great heaving nostalgia attached to the old machine. The history of its growth reads as excitingly as politics in Ottawa. Besides, people these days show far too much reflex yearning for the snows of yesteryear. Let the thing...
Phil and Rita's life shimmered like an advertisement. Indeed, to an outsider it seemed less a life than a perfect lifestyle: tree-lined California suburban street, tasteful $150.000 home (with piano), two sunny youngsters. Phil, 37, was a $30,000-a-year microchip sales engineer in Silicon Valley; Rita. 34, was a $20,000-a-year bookkeeper. Like their smart, attractive Northern California friends. Phil and Rita played tennis and ate interesting foods and knew about wine and, starting four years ago, sniffed coke...
Next day in Silicon Valley, there was a 45-minute royal tour of a Hewlett Packard microchip factory. The Queen is to get, courtesy of the Government, the company's $24,000 HP 250 business computer system. It will be installed at Buckingham Palace, presumably to help manage the breeding and feeding of her dozens of Thoroughbreds...
...same brainstorm. Almost simultaneously, they realized that any number of transistors could be etched directly on a single piece of silicon along with the connections between them. Such integrated circuits (ICs) contained entire sections of a computer, for example, a logic circuit or a memory register. The microchip was born...